Game Boy Pixel Art · Reference
Tone and Key (parked)
How four shades get dark — measured, but set aside until readability is solid.
Parked on 2026-09-10. This started as a lesson about making four-shade art feel grim. You asked to drop the dark direction and concentrate on readable characters and environments, so it is no longer in the lesson sequence. The measurements are kept because they are real and because one idea from here — key — is still used by the readability rule in Lesson 04.
Nothing here is required reading. Come back to it when you want to control mood.
Key
Key is the average shade index across an asset’s drawn pixels, where Paper is 0 and Ink is 3. All-Paper art scores 0; all-Ink art scores 3.
| Key | Reads |
|---|---|
| below 1.6 | bright |
| 1.6 – 2.0 | neutral |
| above 2.0 | dark |
It is the only tonal control that is not a hue, and it fits in your head while drawing.
The measured ladder
Every environment in this workspace, sorted by key. Shares are of drawn pixels; produced
by assets/build-examples.py.
| Environment | Key | Paper | Light | Dark | Ink |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pokémon-alike top-down (ArMM1998) | 0.87 | 41.3% | 37.9% | 13.2% | 7.7% |
| GBJam platformer tiles (LittleSadNerd) | 1.39 | 18.1% | 40.0% | 26.3% | 15.6% |
| Cave tiles (Jana Ochse) | 1.45 | 41.5% | 4.7% | 21.5% | 32.3% |
| Platformer tiles, green (Chloe Wolfe) | 1.75 | 5.2% | 31.8% | 45.3% | 17.7% |
| Platformer tiles, brown (Chloe Wolfe) | 1.82 | 3.6% | 31.5% | 44.5% | 20.4% |
| Dungeon tiles (stealthix) | 2.09 | 1.0% | 35.7% | 17.0% | 46.3% |
| Interior tiles (stealthix) | 2.11 | 1.0% | 31.1% | 24.2% | 43.7% |
Two things this settles:
- Subject does not set tone. The cave is a cave and sits near the bright end, because its artist gave 41.5% of the pixels to the lightest shade.
- Paper share is the dial. It runs 41.5% down to 1.0% across the ladder, tracking tone more cleanly than anything else in the table.
Dark is bimodal, not uniformly dim
The dungeon sheet puts 82% of its pixels in Light + Ink and only 17% in Dark. The neutral tilesets are the opposite — Dark alone is 44–45%.
So darkening everything evenly reads as mud. Pushing the two ends apart, and letting the midtone almost vanish, reads as dark and stays crisp.
Why it was parked
Pushing key up fights readability. A background at key 2.09 carries as much Ink as a character does, and the character stops separating — measured contrast drops to 0.89 on a 0–3 scale, where about 1.2 is the floor for legibility. Getting a scene dark and readable is a harder problem than getting it readable, so readability comes first.
The full figure-ground consequence, and the arithmetic that resolves it, is in Lesson 04.