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Scratch Spriting Tutorial

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My very first tutorial! ^^ This is for those of you that want to make small sprites completely from scratch without using anything like Photoshop and such. Nope, this is for the MS Paint Pixel Artist or those that want to be one. =) I don't know if this is the best tutorial, but it's A tutorial. ^^;

Before I start this tutorial, I want to say one thing: KNOW WHAT YOU'RE SPRITING! Best case scenario is to draw a picture of what it is. More often than not, I've seen recolors of official sprites passed off as original characters because the spriter "didn't know what [they] looked like." -_-

If you're spriting to fit it into another style, make sure you know how it works. How is the shading? Are the colors dull or are they shiny? What position does the light fall? Are the limbs realistic or super-deformed?

In this example, I want to sprite Ashe using Model O in Rockman ZX style, because I don't want her to simply look like Omega. First, find colors that match both how you imagine it and the style. For the moment, don't worry about color limits, just select the colors that you plan on using.

ZX style has a main color for the armor or clothing and the colors for the jumpsuit, skin, hair, and trim. Don't worry about color limits until you have finished making the sprite. Of course, if it is your own custom style, you don't have to worry about color limits unless you want to.

Focus on one body part at a time. Outline the basic shape of the sprite with ONE color. Leave the outline for now, and then, keeping the body parts separate, make the rest of the body so that you have a bunch of wire-frame like pieces. They may not look a thing like sprites yet. Most ZX humans and Reploids have the same stock face, so I added that in here. But make sure that you scratch it. Copying and pasting from another sprite is cheating, especially if you claim that it is your original sprite. The moment you copy and pasted, it was no longer completely your sprite. If you placed the pixels down yourself, then it is yours. Colors are not copyrighted, so feel free to find good colors on other sprites.

Once you feel you have made all of your parts, put the pieces together (you may want to copy and paste them so that you don't lose the originals, especially if parts don't fit). Make any necessary adjustments, such as removing overlap.

If you like how it looks, you're now ready to color it in! Do only one color at a time, and make sure that you edit your outlines with the correct color. This is probably the hardest part of spriting -- making sure you get the shading style correct.

Looks like a sprite, huh? You're done, right? WRONG. There's still one thing left to do -- count the colors. ZX style sprites normally have 16 colors, and one of those is used for transparency purposes. That means that all ZX sprites can have a maximum of 15 colors. This particular sprite has 20 colors, so we need to cut it down.

The easiest way to do this is to check your palette. Are there any colors that are extremely close to each other? What about colors that really aren't that necessary?

In this particular sprite...
-The forehead gem uses two shades of blue that aren't found anywhere else on the sprite. These two are easily replaced with the two lightest shades of gray.
-Her face uses colors that aren't used ANYWHERE else. The blues, purples, and grays of her eyes are replaced with colors that are already there.

By the way, to mass recolor a sprite on Paint, use the Eraser Tool and select the color you want to change as the foreground color and the color you want to change it too as the background color. Then RIGHT-CLICK and drag the Eraser over the sprite.

That removed five colors from Model O Ashe, and she now has exactly 15 colors.
It IS possible to cut the colors down even further (down to 13), but it isn't necessary.

To do that:
-You would need to merge the skin and lightest pink from her armor (find a pink from another palette that is "inbetween both of them" and color both her skin and armor with it).
-Change the orange on her face to the darkest shade of yellow. And so that it doesn't look bad, change the brown on her face to another yellowish-gray shade.

Both versions look good. =) And now, you should be done! Do realize that this is NOT a process that'll take only a few minutes. Depending on the complexity of the sprite, it could take a few hours or even a few days!

Some other spriting tips:
-Don't resize your sprites. If you have trouble seeing (or are nearly blind like me), then simply use the Magnifier to zoom it up to 8x or 800%.
-NEVER, EVER SAVE YOUR SPRITES AS JPEG! This messes up the sprites beyond repair, and increases the number of colors to an insane amount. The best format to save your sprites in is PNG.
-Practice makes perfect! No one can just scratch an extremely awesome sprite on their first try. Make something simple such as a balloon or a Biometal before taking on humans and such.
-Don't pillowshade. Unless the style specifically calls for it (and I don't know of any that do), do NOT make a border and then simply outline it so that the lightsource is in the middle. Typically, lightsources don't come from the middle.
-Don't use pure white or pure black on a sprite except for transparency purposes. And don't use MS Paint's default colors, period. They look hideous on most sprites.

Final comments:
This may or may not be the most efficient way to create sprites. This is simply the method that I choose to do sprite work with. It is impossible to teach someone how to sprite in the same way it is impossible to teach a person how to swim -- you just have to get in and try it.

Ashe and Model O (c) Capcom
Human Ashe and Biometal Model O sprites (c) Capcom
Model O Ashe sprites and tutorial (c) Shree P, aka me. No stealing.
Image size
991x2263px 82.81 KB
© 2009 - 2024 Shreedle
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EternalRetribution's avatar
How many colours would you say max for a MegaMan ZX sprite?