What I'm Doing Now

• Shantae Dance1 Gbc

  July 23, 2026

  The basic idea ended up being to double the sprite pixels (nearest neighbor), then do traditional photoshop shading, add colors using gradient maps, then shrink the result back down (bilinear), and then finally apply the original gameboy advance palette to it. If you want all the details, you can look at [the PSD file](https://humbird0.com/makes/pictures/shantae_dance1/shantae_dance_gba_photoshop_shading.zip).

  

• Shantae Dance1 Gbc

  July 23, 2026

  Unlike my previous anti-aliasing experiments which blur the entire picture with bilinear scaling, this approach only really blurs the shading, because the double-size pixels of the outline end up scaling back down as-is. I consider this a successful result.

  

• Shantae Dance1 Gbc

  July 23, 2026

  How does this compare to the actual Shantae games?
  
  I think the difference comes down to art skill more than technical methods at this point. For one thing I forgot to draw her hair bangs. But the original sprite also has me beat with additional details, and those details do look sharper. But I'm pretty satisfied with what I managed to achieve.

  

• Shantae Dance1 Gbc

  July 23, 2026

  My overall conclusions are that you should draw sprite outlines by hand (but you can trace). You can optionally add anti-aliasing to the outline by hand as well. Then you can add shading using Photoshop at double size (nearest neighbor) and then afterwards shrink that back down using bilinear scaling. At the end you could adjust a few pixels here and there by hand if needed, but in this case I didn't even need to!

• Shantae Dance1 Gbc

  July 23, 2026

  ... and since someone requested it, I also made a naked version. All I did was switch the red parts to skin tones, and then adjust the results by hand to remove the "parachute pants"