Palette shading

Palette shading moves painted pixels through a sequence of colors you choose. Deepen a fold or brighten a surface without painting over an outline color outside that sequence. Use ordinary Pencil painting to place a new color directly.

Prepare a color sequence

A color ramp is an ordered sequence of related colors, usually from shadow to highlight. Choose colors from a palette or sample them from your drawing, then arrange them in the order you want Shading to use.

Shade existing pixels

1. Include the painted color in  Palette. Eyedropper can help you pick its exact color; add it to the palette if needed.
2. Choose Palette options > Prepare shading…. Click at least two distinct nontransparent colors to build a sequence. Select a sequence color to move or remove it, or reverse the sequence. The palette itself does not change.
3. Select a sequence color to preview each click’s result, then choose Apply. This activates  Pencil > Mode > Shade with palette.
4. Paint over matching pixels. Left-drag steps toward the sequence’s start; right-drag steps toward its end. Reverse swaps the directions.

For example, choose a dark brown, the exact brown already painted on a sprite, and a lighter brown, in that palette order. A left stroke moves the matching middle brown toward the dark color; a right stroke moves it toward the light color. A differently colored outline stays unchanged.

The palette action is disabled for an unavailable target. Use a visible, unlocked Pixels layer and finish pending edits first. Paths must be explicitly rasterized if you want to shade them with pixel strokes. This edits the current frame; it does not change editable source geometry.

Keep control of the result

Only exact RGB matches in the selected sequence change. Pixel alpha is preserved; fully transparent pixels remain unchanged. Endpoints stop at the first/last color. Repeated RGB entries count once, using their first sequence position. Brush overlap and symmetry affect each pixel only once per gesture; another stroke advances it again. Each completed gesture is one undoable edit.

Size, shape, symmetry, 1 px Pixel-Perfect, selections and layer offsets still apply. Hold E for temporary erasing. Opacity, painting colors and Auto-fill are disabled while shading. Switch back to Mode > Paint to restore them. The configurable mode shortcuts remain D for Paint and S for Shading.

A plain palette click picks foreground; right-click picks background, and double-click edits a swatch. While shading, plain color picks keep your explicit sequence; use Prepare shading… to change it. Editing palette colors or order resets that selection. Selection and mode are session settings; the palette and painted pixels save normally in native documents.