Shading & color ramps

Shading lets you sculpt highlights and shadows by stepping pixels along a pre-defined colour ramp (an ordered list of shades, darkest → lightest). Click to darken a pixel by one step; Shift+click to lighten. Trail-tracked so a single drag advances each pixel only once.

This is a workflow built for game-friendly pixel art: you stay within a constrained palette and the result is consistent.

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Where to find it

• Shade tool: H hotkey, or Tools panel → tool grid (Droplet icon).
• Ramps panel: appears in the Tools panel below the brush settings when the Shade tool is active.

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How it works

1. Pick colours from your palette in order — darkest first, lightest last. Most useful ramps have 3–6 shades of one hue (e.g. four greens for foliage, five skin tones, three metal greys).
2. Click on canvas with the Shade tool → that pixel moves one step darker in the ramp.
3. Shift+click → one step lighter.
4. A continuous drag shades each pixel only once per stroke — you won't accidentally over-shade.

If you click a pixel whose colour isn't exactly in the ramp, it first snaps to the nearest entry in the ramp, then steps from there.

Transparent pixels are skipped.

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Building a ramp

1. With the Shade tool active, find the Color Ramps section.
2. Click + to create a new empty ramp.
3. Pick a colour from the palette to set it as primary, then click + Add primary in the ramp panel — that colour is appended.
4. Repeat for each step from darkest to lightest. (You can re-arrange later by deleting and re-adding.)
5. Optionally rename the ramp (input field).

Multiple ramps coexist; pick the active one from the dropdown. Each ramp has its own × button to delete.

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Suggested ramps to start

A useful pattern is 3 shades per hue, with one or two highlight shades:

• Skin: dark brown → mid skin → light skin → highlight white
• Metal: dark grey → mid grey → light grey → near-white highlight
• Foliage: dark green → mid green → light green → yellow highlight
• Stone: black → dark grey → mid grey → off-white

Start with the mid-tone as a base flat colour. Use Shade with shift to add highlights, regular click to add shadows.

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Workflow

1. Block in the silhouette with one mid-tone (your future "base" of the ramp).
2. Make sure your palette has at least one shade darker and one shade lighter than that mid-tone.
3. Build a ramp covering those shades.
4. Switch to Shade. Find the imaginary light source.
5. Click on the side away from the light to add shadow (each click = one step darker).
6. Shift-click on the side toward the light for highlights.
7. If you click too many times, undo (Ctrl+Z) — each click is one undo step.

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Tips

• Ramps are per-project and persisted in .mstack.
• A pixel not in the ramp snaps to the nearest entry first — useful when you imported pixel art from elsewhere and want to integrate it into your shading scheme.
• The "once-per-stroke" rule means you can drag broadly without over-darkening; if you want to shade a region by N steps, do N strokes.
• Pair this with Symmetry to shade both sides of a character at once.

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Related

• Drawing tools
• Palette panel
• Indexed mode — keeps your editing on-palette automatically