The house is looking pretty good, but now we need to add some cast shadows to give it that extra punch and accent the different sections of the house. You could probably do this with Paint Shop Pro's drop shadow effect, but I don't think a 'drop shadow' works well in a pixel painting. It is generally accepted that 'pure' pixel art must be created without the use of automatic filters such as anti-aliasing and gradients. That would include drop-shadow filters. So we're going to stick with that school of thought and create all gradients by hand, pixel by pixel. It will give us the best quality shadow when we export image as gif and will also give us a more control over shadow placement.
To speed things up, however, I have provided some pre-made shadow gradients in the COLOR SWATCH layer. An angled gradient for the roof gables plus a horizontal gradient for other areas have been built from the 8 shades shown in swatch. There are a few places on the house where there won't be enough room to use all 8 shades but, where there is room, we'll just copy the pre-made gradient and paste in place. For other areas, pick colors from the shadow swatch to paint pixel by pixel.
It is important to build the shadows on a separate layer so we can reduce the opacity until the shadow color looks 'just right'.
Create a new raster layer named SHADOWS.
Remember, the Zoom tool is your best friend for doing this kind of stuff! Zoom in.
The first shadow we'll do is cast by the roof overhang on the large front gable.
1. From the SWATCH layer, copy the angled gradient.
2. Return to the SHADOW layer and paste a shadow line under the left side of each roof gable. Start at the peak and paste the gradient so it tucks in next to the blue.
3. Repeat a couple times, then copy this new, longer piece of shadow and paste again. Repeat until it's filled in all the way down to the gable end.
4. The very last pixels at the end will need to be painted in one pixel at a time. There's probably a few missing pixels up at the peak that will also need to be painted in pixel by pixel.
Copy a long length of finished shadow and paste it onto the other gable. Repeat until it is complete. Select none. Fill in any missing pixels at the peak and gable end.
Reduce opacity of this layer to 50% to preview how shadows look and then return it to 100% to work on some more shadow locations.