About

In this document, you can see my process on how I shade my firearm designs under the LUV pixel scale–which you may have seen [some of them] featured by IzzyLuv-BG - Hobbyist, Digital Artist | DeviantArt in their project called Project: LUV–and how I would go about doing it as well.

While this is a tutorial, I don’t expect you to follow this process or guide perfectly, so I will not consider any of this as a “proper way” to shade. There's a slight difference comparing my way of shading to Luv’s. However, their way of shading came a long way before my way of shading for pixel art being that they usually shade with several steps added while I use shortcuts.

Software Used

In this guide, I am using paintdotnet exclusively but you can probably achieve this in almost all raster image editing software such as:

Photoshop/Photopea
Affinity Photo
GNU Image Manipulation Program
lvllvl
Aseprite/LibreSprite

If you’re feeling like that type of guy, you can also try using vector editing software such as:

Illustrator
Affinity Designer
Inkscape

Effects/adjustments Used (paintdotnet)

I use a mix of both stock and 3rd-party effects and adjustments. Here’s a list of what I use for shading firearm designs.

Stock
- Hue / Saturation
  - Alternatively, you can reduce the lightness value of pixels by -25.
3rd-party
- Drop Shadow (Kris Vandermotten: Kris Vandermotten's Paint.NET Effects)
  - Alternatively, you can duplicate your firearm to a new layer, make every non-transparent pixel black with an Alpha of 110, and shift the pixels left (x) by 3 and down (y) by 3 (the y-offset is inverted to where positive values are down and negative values are up).
  - There’s already a stock paintdotnet object effect called such, but that didn’t exist before it was finally added. Plus, Vandermotten’s version has more control over the shadow offset.

Shading Process

Here is the process I take when applying shading to my firearm designs. In this example, I am making a suppressor with the following steps.

Block out the general shape. This will be the base for the major (and minor) details.
Draw in lines to signify indents, bevels, depth, etc…
Make these lines the same color as the surface. In this case, I made them red for visibility.
Select the lines and, with a Hue / Saturation adjustment, darken their lightness by 25.
Add the enclosed areas to the current selection, deselect the lines that aren’t enclosing any surface area, and darken the selection by 25 with a Hue / Saturation adjustment.
Apply a Drop Shadow object effect with the following parameters:
1. Set the x and y offsets to x=-3 and y=3.
2. Set the widening and blur radii to 0.
3. Set the shadow color to a translucent black color with the following RGBA values:
  1. Red: 0
  2. Green: 0
  3. Blue: 0
  4. Alpha: 110

Shading Guide

So now that process is out of the way, let’s get into how I selectively shade certain areas.

Bevels and Surfaces

Bevels

There are probably several other types of bevels than the ones I know, which are the following:

Chamfer
Fillet

In the image below with one object consisting of several surfaces, I’ve color-coded each area for chamfers (red) and fillets (purple). Fillets don’t need shading (but still need to be kept in mind that there’s a bevel there) while chamfers do on the other hand.

Slopes

Shading doesn’t just have to apply to only bevels. It can also apply to any surface. In the image at the bottom with another object consisting of several surfaces, I’ve color-coded each area for flat (dark blue) and sloped (cyan) surfaces. Flat surfaces don’t necessarily need shading if they’re the furthest in the front in terms of depth, but sloped surfaces–even if they start on the same depth as the main surface–need shading.

Cylinders and Cones

In my case for cylindrical surfaces, shading is completely voided unless it’s a conical surface made from the end of a wider surface and the end of a narrower surface. In the image below, I color-coded each area for a flat surface [purple], two cylindrical surfaces [yellow, orange], and a conical “bridging” surface [maroon]. Notice how I didn’t shade the conical surface but rather made darker lines to show the transition between the first cylindrical surface to the second cylindrical surface.

Again, this isn't exactly how Izzy-LuvBGGF does their shading, but it's somewhat close to how they would do it. As I said, they do it with extra steps in between each main step while I do it with those extra steps omitted.

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