Glossary

The canonical vocabulary for four-shade pixel art in this workspace. Every lesson uses these words and only these words. Terms are promoted here once you can use them correctly — not when they are first mentioned.

The palette

Shade: One of the four values available. Identified by index, 0 (lightest) to 3 (darkest). Avoid: Colour, tone, grey

Paper (shade 0): The lightest shade. Reserved for highlight. Avoid: White, shade 1, the light one

Light (shade 1): The second-lightest shade. Describes surfaces facing the light. Avoid: Light grey, midtone

Dark (shade 2): The second-darkest shade. Describes surfaces facing away from the light. Avoid: Dark grey, shadow

Ink (shade 3): The darkest shade. Holds silhouette and separation. Avoid: Black, outline colour, the outline

Tint: The four hex values a project’s shades are finally rendered in — DMG green, grey, duotone. A display decision, applied after the art is finished, swappable at any time. Avoid: Palette, colour scheme, theme

Ramp: The four shades in order, considered as a sequence. A ramp is judged by the gaps between its values, not by the values themselves. Avoid: Gradient, scale

Shape

Silhouette: The character considered as a solid shape, ignoring every interior value. At Game Boy sizes it carries the identity; the interior only clarifies. Avoid: Outline, shape, blob

Fill: Drawn pixels as a share of the sprite’s own bounding box. Working range 60–85%. Avoid: Density, coverage

Enclosed hole: A transparent region fully surrounded by the sprite. Costs the gap plus a ring of Ink, so it is rarely affordable below about three pixels across. Avoid: Gap, negative space

Interior: Every drawn pixel that is not a silhouette-edge pixel. Where Light and Dark do their work. Avoid: Inside, body, fill

Terminator: The line where a form turns away from the light — the boundary between Light and Dark. Kept as one continuous run, never scattered pixels. Avoid: Shadow edge, core shadow

Silhouette contrast: The average shade-index gap between a sprite’s outline and the ground behind it, 0–3. Aim for 1.8; below 1.2 the character dissolves. Avoid: Contrast, pop, readability

Structure

Shade budget: The share of an asset’s drawn pixels given to each shade, as a percentage. The unit this course measures art in. Avoid: Colour distribution, pixel count

Silhouette-edge pixel: A drawn pixel with at least one transparent orthogonal neighbour — a pixel that touches the background. The set of pixels the outline law applies to. Avoid: Border pixel, edge, outline pixel

The outline law: On a character, every silhouette-edge pixel is Ink. No exceptions. Avoid: Outlining, black outline rule

Drawn pixel: Any non-transparent pixel. Shade budgets are always shares of drawn pixels, never of the full canvas — otherwise sprite size would change the numbers. Avoid: Opaque pixel, filled pixel

Parked terms. Key, bimodal, mid-dominant and ink ratio belong to the tone material set aside in Tone and Key. Key still appears in the contrast rule, defined there as the average shade index of an area.

Ambiguities resolved

• “Four colours” in the wider Game Boy world sometimes means four per tile with several palettes on screen (that is Game Boy Color). In this workspace, four shades means four values for the whole project.
• “Sprite” loosely means any pixel art image. Here it means a character or object drawn on transparency, as opposed to a tile, which is drawn edge to edge with no transparency and is expected to sit next to copies of itself.
• “Value” and “shade” are not synonyms. Value is the property; a shade is one of the four values you are allowed to use.