Color Ramp Generator
Generate pixel-art shading ramps with the hue shifts artists actually use. Highlights drift warm, shadows drift cool. Export straight to Aseprite, GIMP, Krita or Lospec.
Base colors
Download palette
How pixel art color ramps work
A color ramp is a set of 3 to 9 colors that represent the same hue at different brightness levels, from the brightest highlight down to the darkest shadow. Pixel artists rarely just lighten or darken a base color linearly; instead they apply deliberate hue shifts to make the lighting feel more natural.
The principle behind this tool: highlights drift warm (toward yellow/orange) and shadows drift cool (toward blue/violet). This mimics how real-world lighting works: warm light sources bounce onto highlight surfaces while blue-tinted ambient sky light fills the shadows. Even a subtle 10-15° hue shift at each step makes sprites feel three-dimensional without adding any extra colors.
For pixel art specifically, keeping your ramp to 5 colors (highlight 2, highlight, base, shadow, shadow 2) lets you shade a character sprite across different lighting conditions without blowing up your palette. Engines like Godot and Phaser can swap entire palettes at runtime, so a clean ramp makes it trivial to recolor characters or indicate status effects.
Tips for choosing a good base color
- →Avoid pure gray as a base. Neutral grays produce ramps with no visible hue shift. Start with a color that has at least some saturation. Even a slight warm or cool tint gives the ramp more visual life.
- →Mid-range lightness works best. A base color around 40-60% lightness leaves room for both highlights and shadows in the ramp. Very dark or very light bases compress the ramp toward one end and lose contrast.
- →Build multiple ramps for a single sprite. A character in leather armor might use three ramps: warm browns for leather, cool grays for metal, and desaturated skin tones. Copy each as a CSS variable set and paste them into your project as a named palette.
Use these ramps in Spritory
Save them as a style profile, and every sprite and effect you build in the Forge uses the same ramps.