Any good Tips on Spriting?

[Important Business]

Hello!

I'm starting to get interested in the spriting business, and I've been wanting to know all about what you guys do. What programs do you use? What style do you prefer? I really would like it if all you artists out there could tell me all about what you do to make the masterpieces you make.

Thank you!

 

[Enjl]

I think by far the best software to use for sprites is Paint.NET. It's very easy to use and you can download it for free!
There are hundreds of plugins available (preinstalled or downloadable), dedicated more towards sweet effects and less towards nice sprites, but just goofing around with them can lead to new inspiration.

In terms of style, I have developed the "random dithering" style for myself last summer. It's basically a cheap way to get some high quality shading onto everything with little time and effort. I do not recommend using it when making sprites though. It's better used in background art and pixel-art paintings.

I'm not familiar with Terraria's sprite style, so I can only tell you little about how to make them. I'm actually interested in knowing this one myself.

 

[Varsia]

GIMP's pretty good, IMO. Would recommend.

Look at Terraria Sprites and the shading, and use them as a base for colour schemes and such.

Make the shape first.

 

[Firearrow15]

Make sure to make your pixels 2x2 if you are trying to match terraria's style. Haven't seen that mentioned yet.

I use paint.net generally, because it is free and has a simpler layout than gimp. A useful in-browser sprite editor is piskel, but it lacks a lot of features. It's good for touch ups.

Speaking of sprite software, does anyone know a good sprite-editing app for iOS? It would be nice to be able to work on stuff while I am not at a computer.

Anyway, I believe there are one or two good guides over on the art board.

 

[AmmunitionCodBeeDuster]

You might wanna try basing your first sprites off ingame items, using them as a base. for programs, I use photoshop, but a nice free alternative would be gimp or paint.net.

 

[Seeker]

What program do I use? I use the Windows Paint that comes on my computer, none of this fancy-shmancy crap. Anyways, any other tips? Check out the guide on these very forums (wasn't much help to me but you can go ahead and read it) Also as Zephus said base your sprites off existing sprites. Sometimes you can just use sprites as a base for height comparison and such.

 

[Baconfry]

I dunno about you guys, but I generally fill in each color/shade one by one and try to encompass the entire light-dark spectrum. Some of my sprites exemplify this better than others.

More important is looking back on the whole thing, kind of squinting at it... looking at it from a distance... maybe upside-down... and modifying pixels in a kind of random manner. Also, if there was a drinking game in which you took a sip every time Baconfry hit Ctrl+Z, everyone would be dead.

 

[Gigadweeb]

use GIMP for transparency and animating .gifs, use Windows XP Paint for the rest.

If you're making sprites based around other works (eg. 3rd Gen Pokémon or Terraria), study sprites from that game. Note shading and which direction it comes from, outline colouring, if there's constant use of dithering, is the outline 'clean' (eg. no jagged lines), maximum size for sprites, stuff like that. Don't be afraid to experiment.

 

[monochromegoggles]

Oh boy, where to begin. There's a LOT to consider when making sprites, so bear with me.

Before you even BEGIN to sprite, it's really important to understand how things like Color theory and visual aspects like contrast, hue, saturation etc. come into play. There's a plethora of tutorials on Deviant art that describe these things. This is very important if you want your sprites to have a good, harmonious color palette that allows for all the details to be clear and distinct. You'll find that it's beneficial to make your color palette and test it before you use it on your sprites and such as well. Another thing to keep in mind is that a GOOD color palette usually aims to be interlinked, thus reducing the total amount of colors used while still having enough colors to get the illusion of more when used correctly.

• Here's a an outdated, watered down version of what I'm talking about that I did a while back: Here

• But this person does a bit of a more thorough job explaining it more in-depth: Have a look

• This tutorial shows quite nicely how to make an interlinked palette for sprites AND pixel art: Here A good thing to remember is that sprites are just as reliant on color theory as other forms of art. Understanding how it works will save you a LOT of time and spare you from suffering many a headache later on.

Next, you have to consider what you're doing and the types of shading method/style you want to use. A larger image will allow for more detail with things like texture, clarity of curves, more colors, etc. A smaller image tends to be a little more restricted, so if you're making sprites (which I'm sure is your aim by the title of this post) then you might want to really take a moment and consider the size of sprite you're using/making, and how much 'style' you can cram into the space you're working with.

I however, am not going to tell you what you should do, as you probably want to figure out a particular theme of color and shading on your own. I will however show you some tutorials that I think might be interesting and useful to you, such as:

• A crash course on color theory AND sprite shading all in one post! Here LOOK AT IT AND SPARE YOURSELF THE TORTURE OF LEARNING THE HARD WAY LIKE I DID! ;_;(This is actually a bit faster if you feel like TL: DR and just want to get through the info in one fell swoop)

• This site has a progression list starting with things like making tiled floors for an rpg, down to coloring and animating a fighting game sprite. It's not exactly linear or specific to one type of sprite, but hey, variety is good and can come in handy for a variety of different styles and mediums: Have a look! there's more than just one kind of tutorial!

• Here's another great tutorial by the (seemingly vanished) Kiwinuptuo on different methods of shading. I highly recommend looking at it because it will show you the different kinds of shading techniques step-by-step that can be applied to a sprite, and how they look when finished. IT'S GLORIOUS!

• Not strictly sprite related, but sometimes looking at textures and understanding how to do them in full can help a lot when downsizing to express the texture in a pixel/sprite environment. Check out this list of 100 textures for ideas!

As far as programs are concerned, just about any program that can draw single pixel wide lines a-la a pencil tool is good enough, some are just slightly more tedious than others because they lack some "shortcuts" that people can use to save time. I personally use a drawing program called Paint tool SAI (it's not free, so if you're on a budget, you're better off looking into some other programs), but it handles not all that differently than Microsoft paint when I do pixel work or sprites, and sometimes I have to a bit more work just to make a basic line or curve with it.

However, I have heard that a program known as Graphics gale is made specially for creating sprites, and even has its own built in animation viewer for of you're making a sequence of sprites for animating, and will play it back in real time. It works much like MS Paint and there's a freeware edition of it. You can get it Here
(I haven't used this program much myself, but a few people who HAVE used it for spriting seem to really like it.)

Other programs like Paint.net and GIMP are free and can provide some fancy tools for the job, but I'd recommend trying each out to find one that sits best with your workflow.

I hope this helps you! :3

 

[daimoth]

Learn traditional art ASAP; pixel art is just digital art with technical restrictions.

Head over to wayofthepixel.net, the hands-down best site on the internet for getting your stuff picked apart by both amateurs and industry professionals, and post your work. They don't on beginners, but leave your ego at the door. They will tell you, bluntly and sans pretense, what your work needs. If you listen to them and persist, you will improve. It's that simple. I've seen people post awful doodles initially, then come back years later with a small porfolio of convincing, decent game art.

PixelJoint.com is nice as well, but it's more of a gallery and place to compete against other pixel artists. See their Hall of Fame for eyegasms.

Also, learn to identify good pixel art. The best pixel art I'm aware of is the Metal Slug franchise (the animations in particular). The following artists also come to mind: Cyangmou, Fool, AbyssWolf, Junkboy and Orkimedes. Fool in particular is considered the best pixel artist in the world by some people.

Also, this rules:

So sexy. It's one of Junkboy's.