Colour pallettes for sprite creation.

Anyone know of a method for picking the right colours when creating sprites? I'm terrible at getting the colours for shading, even basic 3 and 4 colour sprites. I just wondered if there's a way to say, pick the colour you want and then use some method to pick the right colour for shadow and highlights? Would save me a lot of time.

Cheers.

I photoshop I'll usually make a 10 to 20 pixel high gradient from one colour to another - it gives a nice selection of swatches to work from and maintain consistency with sprites.

Here's an example from a recent game.

<img src="http://fc09.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2012/237/b/5/wip_sprites_by_johnnysix-d5ccp5r.png" border="0">

In my bookmarks I have a link to this blog article.

It's in my "to check/can be useful" list but I haven't fully checked it out yet, nevertheless, it seems to be relevant to the question.