and 'straight ramp' just means a ramp without hue-shifting. It's primarily about hue, not saturation or luminosity.
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I know what a straight ramp is...and under white lighting conditions, your shading would follow a more or less straight ramp. And I've always heard that value is *much* more important than hue shifts - I'm pretty sure I could make a black and white painting, but I think both of us would have a pretty hard time painting anything just using hue shifts, hahah. Now, don't get me wrong, seiseki's advice will get you a decent result 70% of the time, but his advice *is* a huge oversimplification of how color works. When XLR8ED bumps into those 30% of cases where he needs to know how color actually works, and simply hue shifting to a random color is producing bad results, he won't be able to do anything about it.
And that's why I posted that link. I think it's best to understand how color works, instead of just relying on a shortcut that works by luck 70% of the time. You can hue shift to bright purple for a lot of pixel art because the art is so small it simply makes it "pop." But shadows aren't bright purple in real life. What happens when XLR goes to make a large sprite, like a background or something? The larger your piece of art, the more realistic it needs to look - highlighter purple shadows look great stylistically when they're small, but when the piece is larger, they're just going to burn out your eyes. If you went to a painting forum and told people "just hue shift and make the colors darker," you'd get shot down pretty quickly, hahah.
Anyway, sorry Seiseki, didn't mean to jump on your advice; it'll definitely hold true most of the time. It's just that it won't be true *all* the time. My link explains why, and how to pick the correct color for any condition (with math even, hahah!)
Cheers, guys. o/