How to gradualy turn a sprite's color to pure Whte?

Hi guys , i have been given an assigment at work (I'm doing an internship con a small video game company) , i have to gradualy turn our main character (which is composed of 50+sprites) into a full white silhouette whenever I the player presses a certain button on the keyboard.

I tried Lerping the current spriteRenderer color to white but doesn's seem to work . I have read that one way of achieving this effect is to use shaders . Is that the only way to achieve that effect?If so : Where can I find good documentation/examples/tutorials about Shader programming in Unity? Will programming a brand new shader that does this little effect be too hard for a guy who has never programmed any shaders at all?I've been reading the Unity documentation on shaders , but there are a lot of things thar are still confusing to me . I hope you can help me.

 

Shaders is probably the way to go.

I found this to be a really good tutorial on shaders:
https://cgcookie.com/unity/cgc-courses/noob-to-pro-shader-writing-for-unity-4-beginner/

 

Since your doing an assignment while in an internship you should probably go the shader way, but another simple solution is to animate a light to hot white - the light would be setup to only effect the character.

 

Color.Lerp() should work fine, what was the problem?