The process

I've been reading up a lot on sprite creation. I've read several tutorials and I thoroughly enjoy moving those tiny pixels around the screen until I'm happy with the result.

It's creative and time-consuming. For some reason the nerd in me appreciates the latter element. I also do sketches and write short stories, but there's something appealing about the amount of time that goes into a piece of work.

I really like Derek Yu's tutorial. I also like this one on spriting at The Cave of Dragonflies.

I've started in a slightly different way to both of them. I took one of my little SNES RPG-esque characters from a sprite I'd created earlier and now I want to realise a larger version.

I'll detail the process in this blog post over the next little while. Not all at once, just when I need to procrastinate.

Let's start from the beginning:

I like to work in Paint.NET, a freeware utility that lends itself well to sprite creation.

1) I took my original image and blew it up to a size I was happy with (using the "nearest colour" setting for resizing, and blowing it up to an integer multiple of 100% - only necessary if you're working with a smaller sprite).

2) I then took the pencil tool and outlined, in a cartoon fashion, my original creation (this was done in a new layer and with very little care given to exactness).

3) Keeping the original sprite open in another file (still in Paint.Net), after saving a new file, I removed the background image, leaving just my outline. I then proceeded to scour the outline and ensure that each line only had a width of 1 pixel. I also added a few touches to improve my original attempt.