Pixel Art: Terms / Linguo / Techniques Part 2

so im gonna talk a bit about bad techniques and how you can avoid them, so lets get to it:

Pillow Shading

pillow shading is an effect that occurs when in an attempt to shade an object the artist will not consciously pick light source, the end result is shitty looking banded shading from the centre of the object radiating outwards ( like an onion, its got layers [ not like an ogre ( they don't have layers )]) pillow shading can be fixed slightly by dithering but you will still have the underlying weak lighting issues causing any other items to be added to the scene to also look oddly lit even if they are not pillow shaded themselves.

Examples:

pillow shading on all sides of a cube and a face with pillow shading.
don't do this there are no fixes besides reworking all the clusters in the image or starting again.

Jaggies

Jaggies are often seen in line work, but can also be found when clusters meet each other, the cause is usually noobish mistakes, avoiding the use off aa or simply not cleaning your line work, so here's what it looks like.

Examples:

on the left bad line work is cleaned using the sequence method (11122322112321...) and on the right AA is used to soften the deliberately straight line.

Banding

banding is when the placement of your pixels cause a loss in apparent resolution, usually occurring around the edges of a piece though any area is prone to banding. banding in low resolution pieces is generally acceptable as altering out banding at that level can change the whole identity of what the cluster is conveying, but in a larger piece say 150 pixels and up avoiding banding is a good practice, banding comes in many forms and ill go through a few of them now.

Examples:

(note: plz ignore the bad everything in these pictures)
1. Staircase banding: pretty bad banding, occurring when a line of pixels goes parallel with another line of pixels. this also occurs as hugging banding in the shading on the arm

2. Highlight banding: another common newby form of banding when the highlight follows the along with the edge or outline of the piece, this can be fixed by AA or deleting out pixels that are on the edge of eace "step"

3.Spaced Banding: this one is tricky, your brain is awesome, it can calculate that 2 rows of unconnected pixels are on the same level and link up that there is a common row of pixels causing, yep, banding. AA can help as well as moving highlights or effected areas a pixel or so

4. 45 degree banding: pixels at 45 degrees are very easy to spot at natural resolution using a sel-out can help stop this also putting in another step for your lines