Pixel tutorial - Seven solutions to color banding

EDIT: Enlarged so you don't need to stick this in an image editor to see the pixels.

After poking around with whatever tutorials happened to be on deviantART, pixel art tutorials happen to strangely offer dithering as the only solution to a particular problem of color banding. Color banding is an effect when you can see bands of color when something is supposed to look like a gradient.

Of course, most tutorials will offer dithering as a method to create the intended gradient for shading purposes. There are at least seven different ways to approach the same problem. Dithering is only one solution but it is often poorly controlled and in some cases, the dithered colors do not blend via being too high contrast, and it creates an inappropriate texture for the given subject.

The 'use a different medium of art' example was painted in GIMP in a minute. Achieving a similar look with pixel takes a lot longer to do.