Game Boy Pixel Art · Lesson 03 · 12 min
Two Mids Do the Form
Inside the outline, Light and Dark carry almost everything — and Ink is barely used at all.
You have a silhouette. It is about a third outline, and the rest is empty. This lesson is about what goes in that space — and the answer is narrower than you would guess.
Measure the inside only
Take the four CC0 characters, throw away every silhouette-edge pixel, and measure what is left. This is the interior shade mix — the pixels that are actually describing surface:
| Character | Paper | Light | Dark | Ink | Two mids together |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fluffy, idle | 3.5% | 49.1% | 33.9% | 13.5% | 83.0% |
| Ninja, running | 9.7% | 34.7% | 41.7% | 13.9% | 76.4% |
| Knight | 7.5% | 59.7% | 32.8% | 0.0% | 92.5% |
| Sensei boss | 31.6% | 30.4% | 16.5% | 21.5% | 46.9% |
Light and Dark carry 76–93% of the interior. Everything you are going to say about volume, material and light direction gets said with two values.
The finding that will change how you draw
Look at the Ink column. Inside the shape it runs 0.0% to 13.9%. The knight uses none at all — every single Ink pixel in that sprite is on the silhouette.
Ink is for the edge. Stop drawing with it inside. The interior Ink these artists do spend is almost entirely on features that must read as holes — eyes, a mouth, the gap under a helmet — not on shading.
This is the single most common way a small sprite turns to mud: using the darkest shade as “the shadow”. It isn’t the shadow. Dark is the shadow. Ink is the boundary.
Compare Fluffy’s separated shades again — the Dark panel is soft clusters describing the underside of a round body; the Ink panel is a closed ring plus a face. Two completely different jobs at the same distance apart on the ramp.
Lightlit side
Darkturned away
Inkedge + features
Which mid goes where
Two values means the decision is binary, which is a gift. Fix a light direction and never move it — top-left is the convention and there is no reason to fight it.
- Surfaces facing up and left → Light
- Surfaces facing down and right → Dark
- The boundary between them is the terminator — the line where the form turns away. Keep it as one continuous run, not scattered pixels.
That’s it. There is no third option, because there is no third mid.
The Sensei is the exception, and it teaches the rule
The boss breaks the pattern: 31.6% Paper inside, two mids at only 46.9%. It is not a mistake — it is a big character that needs to read as a large lit mass rather than as a described surface. It buys presence by giving up form.
That trade is available to you for one or two important characters. It is not available for all of them, because if everything is a lit mass, nothing is.
Shade the silhouette you drew
Bring back the shape from Lesson 02 — or draw a new one in Ink first. Then fill with Light, carve with Dark, and spend two or three pixels of Paper if the object has anything shiny or wet.
The pad checks the character contract: Ink 25–50%, Paper at or below 6%, every silhouette pixel Ink. Inside the shape, try to spend no Ink at all.
If it looks muddy, the diagnosis is almost always one of two things: Ink has crept inside, or your terminator is broken into scattered pixels instead of one run.
Check yourself
Take it further
- Read next: SLYNYRD — Pixelblog 6: Light and Shadow. Fixing a light source, assigning value by surface direction, and terminator lines — written for bigger palettes, but the reasoning is exactly what two mids need.
- Pedro Medeiros on clusters and banding — the two failure modes you will hit once Light and Dark are doing real work.
Keep
- The Four-Shade Contract.
- Glossary — terminator, interior mix.
Next: Making Your Character Read Anywhere — the last character lesson before tiles.
Send me a sprite and I will measure its interior mix. It is faster than arguing about whether it looks muddy.