People who seems to be dissapointed SB as "restrictive" should really try out all the myriad variations that the rather simple shading and shaddowing rules allow each individual artist to mess around with. I've said these words a million times now, and partially its my responsibility to say them again:
SB and FD scale rules allows wonderfull renditions of round shapes in natural metal color. Alavama's example is just one version of the ways the natural metal can be brougth into good use, and there are more ways too...all perfectly allied to the actuall rules. The begining idea of gradient shading is just too crude and horrible to be applied into rather simple Pixel art, and all the instances its been tried (And trust me, its been tried lot, even before most of you ever knew about SB
)...and the end result has always been hiddeous. Only sophisticated drawing tools and actuall digital painting can produce the level of gradient differences that would actually look appeasing...but then you are so faraway from the pixel art idea of SB that even superficial attempt it to be reproduced in MSpaint level technics becomes pretentious and false.
Thats why the entire idea of SB style shading has always allowed only bilateral shading between two tones.. be them what ever color.
Offcourse there is always the backdoor option...in form of, If you don't like it, take it and leave us then. Internet is wide and open for everyone to express themselves as much they want. Me and propably everyone else of the SB artists here don't like that much of the idea of using our own forum to bash against the style itself. That sort of talk has its place, but its not in here.