I don’t plan on posting art here often. I’m just doing so now because I’d like tips on using dithering as shading. Today’s Lospec daily was “ring”, and the palette was a GB palette. Naturally, I used dithering due to the lack of colors. However, I don’t think the shine and shading turned out as I was imagining it. Here’s the art, and a timelapse of me making to show you my process (custom dithering brushes are weak)
Tips and feedback appreciated. Constructive criticism is ok, but please don’t just straight up insult me.
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Why would you think people would insult you? Now I gotta 
Yo mamma… anyways.
I like that you are experimenting with dithering which can be very difficult.
This is your image. If you squint it seems more like a pincer shape than a ring.
The difficulty lies in making a rounded 3D object with squares you did pretty well in that regard.
If you are trying to make a Lord Of The Rings-type ring the most important part is to show depth (and writing detail if any) so you need to be careful of using black for shading colours other than black for the outline.
See how a single colour (bigger brush size) in a circle creates a more convincing ring shape.
Here is a vertically transformed version. I know it doesn’t look like a ring that is because of how I altered the curves trying to give it more vertical depth which ruined the perspective.
So I made two Identical ovals for the top and bottom to help me simplify the shapes. I add two straight lines with rounded corners between the circles and then refine it.
I also resized it because the original image is bigger. I also made sure that there was thickness on the top of the ring. Only make your shading dithering if you are sure of your lighting first. I usually do dithering last.
In conclusion: I find the palette you chose very limiting for this kind of project because it makes it difficult to round things out using more shades of color. the project could have used a colour other than black better. Dithering is nice for blending colors in a larger image but you should be mindful when to use it. Dithering also works best if paired with non-uniform outlines(not what I ended up doing here). One example would be this Charmander picture from Google
If you aren’t sure what you are doing, the ring will end up not rounded out properly and the black will wash out the actual definition of the shape. I ended up separating the other side of the ring from its top
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Last thing, don’t be discouraged by making mistakes, It took me 7 iterations(6 of which are not good) to reach this semi-workable state.
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Random tip, if you have siblings, family, friends, or roommates you can ask them what it looks like and see their advice too.
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Thank you for the advice! As for why I used this palette, when I don’t know what to draw I just draw the Lospec daily tag using the Lospec daily palette (I do not, however, do this daily). And as for a non-uniform outline, I’d never considered that before. I’ll make sure to try that at some point. This advice was very useful, and I’ll make sure to take it into account next time I’m shading using dithering in a limited palette. Thanks for your help!
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How’d you do the timelapse?
I’m not sure if this is what he used, but there’s an extension called ‘record for aseprite’. Here’s a link to it, I hope that helps: Record for Aseprite by sprngr