Spriting guide

Learn to sprite here with this guide! All examples in it are mine and are not to be taken off this page without appropriate credit. Well, I'm not going to do anything if you steal the finished recolor examples because recoloring is the simplest thing in the world and you could as well have made it yourself. But yeah, if you take anything else you'll have to face dire consequences. Mwahahaha.

The section "Things to Know First" is, well, things you need to know first. If you already have some spriting experience, you've probably figured that stuff out already; it's just the very basics of spriting, what it is, preaching about not saving as .jpg, etc. as well as some sprite resources. "Popular Spriting Categories" has several tutorials each focused on a certain area of popular spriting, such as recoloring, revamping and splicing, that go through the step by step process of making such a sprite. "In-Depth Tutorials" contains more extensive material on how to master some of the techniques used in spriting.

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Things to Know First
- What Is Spriting?
- Where to Get Sprites
Popular Spriting Categories
In-Depth Tutorials
- Outlining
Closing Words

Things to Know First

What Is Spriting?

A sprite (not a "spirit", as some people call them, annoying me to no end) is basically an image of a character or object from a video game. When it comes to Pokémon, the sprites referred to are usually Pokémon sprites and sometimes trainer sprites from the Game Boy Pokémon games, most of the time the Advance or DS games (Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald, FireRed, LeafGreen, Diamond and Pearl) except in the case of revamps. This guide will not touch on trainer sprites at all, as I myself am not very skilled with them.

The Pokémon sprites are pixel art. That means you should always follow these rules:

Do not save them in .jpg format. Even if somebody is holding a gun to your head.
Do not resize them. Magnify them for working with them, but do NOT resize them.
Do not mix sprites with other types of artwork or even different styles of spriting (sprites with more/fewer colors, sprites with drastically different styles, etc.).
Sprites are small. If you're spriting in Paint, then for the love of all things holy, resize the image frame down to fit around the sprite.
The only tools you should use on them are a one-pixel pencil tool, maybe a slightly larger eraser tool (which must, in better paint programs, be in Pencil mode), a Paint Bucket tool that definitely has anti-alias off, and some selection tools that also have anti-alias off. Basically, don't use anything anti-aliased on a sprite. Anti-alias is when instead of being blocky and pixely like a sprite, it's soft and blurry. Paint has no anti-alias, if that's what you're working in, so don't worry about it if you're using Paint.

If you make sure to follow those, you should be fine against the very basic Deadly Sins of Spriting. Oh, and there is a reason the guide is in this order. Don't read the splice part first just because you're most excited to start doing those. You need to know stuff from the recoloring and revamping parts for it.

Where to Get Sprites

Well, before you can do any spriting, you have to get the original game sprites somewhere. You can use my Pokémon Sprite Generator to get both the R/S, Emerald, FR/LG and D/P sprites of the Pokémon you're going to work with quickly, or, if you need other sprites, try PokémonElite2000's sprite resource. If you want to download all the sprites for use, you can always download my sprite packages.

Popular Spriting Categories

Recolors

I always used to refer to this as "custom coloring", since I referred to revamps as recolors, but the common term for it appears to be "recoloring", so I guess I have to switch.

This is the first thing you should learn, as you should know how it works before attempting anything else - you'll need to know the basics of this if you're going to be any good at all.

What you see here is a Ruby and Sapphire Scyther sprite, which is a very typical sprite color-wise, with its color palette beside it, and what this guide will refer to the shades as. The "outline shadows" are always black on Pokémon sprites - remember that if you want your recolors to look official. (Technically, all-color outlines in sprites are a pet peeve of mine unless they're supposed to be 'glowing', but meh, have it as you like.)

The Rules of Recoloring

There is a reason it has all those shades of green. It's called shading, and it's supposed to be there. DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, RECOLOR TWO SHADES WITH THE SAME COLOR. Well, unless the sprite you're recoloring has a larger number of shades than the sprite whose colors you're borrowing.
There is a reason all the shades on the main body are green, too. Don't make the highlights blue and the main body red unless you're making it eye-hurting on purpose.
The outline base and outline highlight colors are also colors. When you're recoloring, you don't leave them unchanged. Ever.
If area A is darker than area B on the original sprite, area A should be darker than Area B on the result, too.
Do not use the Paint default colors to recolor under any circumstances. Go to Colors > Edit Colors > Define Custom Colors... and there you can make your own color - but do NOT make it too bright. Actually, your best bet is usually to find yourself some other sprite of a normal or shiny Pokémon that has approximately the color you're looking for.

If you can't find any other sprite that has quite the right color, pick the sprite's base color with the color picker. Go to the advanced color selection menu (in Paint, it's Colors > Edit Colors > Define Custom Colors... as I said earlier; in Photoshop or ImageReady, you just click the foreground color in the toolbar). Now play around with the Hue value until you've found the color you want; remember or write down the current value. You can also raise or lower the Brightness/Luminosity or Saturation values, but if you do, remember how much you raise or lower them. Paint a pixel or small square of this color somewhere beside the sprite, and then do the same for the other colors in the sprite - change the hue to the same value as you changed the first color to and lower/raise the brightness/luminosity by the same number as you did for the first color, if you did at all, and put a pixel/square of it next to the previous color. If the color doesn't look quite right after doing this, you can tweak it slightly. Of course, you won't have to do this for the black, and I recommend not heightening the brightness of the base outline color if you've been doing that for the other colors.

Of course, if you're taking the colors from another Pokémon, you can take them straight from the other sprite and don't need to make a color palette.

When you've picked all your colors, move on to recolor the sprite accordingly. In better paint programs, it is possible to set the Paint Bucket tool so that it paints all pixels of the same color (in Photoshop or ImageReady, you check off the Contiguous option). In Paint, there is a rather complicated trick. First, select the color picker and left-click the highlight color on the sprite you're recoloring. Then, again with the color picker, right-click the highlight color you're going to use. Next select the Eraser tool, make it the biggest it can get and right-click and drag over the whole sprite. The old highlight color will magically be replaced with the new one everywhere you touched it with the eraser. Repeat this for the other shades too. As per rule 3, make sure not to forget the outline base.

And... that's it. Really. Well, to demonstrate the process, I'm going to screenshot how I recolor that very Scyther sprite. Both in Paint and ImageReady 3.0 (which I like to use for spriting).

ImageReady

I used Articuno blue for this, just because I couldn't be bothered to make two screenshot guides both including the whole finding-colors process.

Open up the two sprites...
Picking Articuno's highlight color with the color picker - Articuno actually has quite a few more shades than my Scyther example, though
Using the Paint Bucket tool with Contiguous off to color Scyther's highlight color
Proceeding with the rest of the shades...
Recolor done!

Paint

In this one, I'm going to make it dark blue, so you get to see the color selection.

I like to use the Paste From command under Edit to get the sprite(s) into the document. Of course, I have them all saved to my computer - you might just want to copy them straight from the Internet.
Magnify it nicely...
Picking the base color with the Color Picker
Never forget the Edit Colors command, kids!
Showing the Edit Colors menu, the button you have to click, and the three values we might be editing - Hue controls the horizontal location of the pointer on that color square thingy, Saturation controls the vertical location, and Luminosity controls where it is on that slider on the side. I don't recommend moving the pointer with the mouse, considering all the calculations from those numbers we'll be doing, but the luminosity should be fine, as long as you remember what the value started at
I'm making the Hue 160, lowering the Saturation by 20, and the Luminosity by 30 - remember, never make the colors too bright. Click the Add to Custom Colors button and then OK on the main Edit Colors menu
Now just paint a little square off by the side with that color in, and do the same with the other colors
Time to color it in - remember, right-click the color you want, left-click the color to replace, and right-click with the eraser
Now that they're on the sprite, it's obvious that the colors were too bright and rather too dark - normally I'd fix that, but I'm feeling lazy
Erase the palette, de-magnify, click the little dot in the bottom right corner of the canvas and drag it so it fits around the sprite... congratulations, you're done.
Enjoy the finished product - always remember to save as .PNG when working in Paint if you want the colors to come out right

Congratulations, you've gotten through the recoloring guide! Once you've mastered this, you can move on to the next part...

Revamps

Revamping is basically the art of taking a sprite from one of the older games and recoloring/shading it to the quality of an Advance counterpart. Newbies in the field do this simply as if they were doing a slightly more complicated version of a recolor - they replace the colors, though using different colors for the different parts, save it and call it a revamp.

That is not a revamp, it's simply a recolor. Don't do that. Ever.

The Rules of Revamping

Thou shalt not make Dots.
Thou shalt edit the outlines and shade them.
Thou shalt edit and add shading where it seems appropriate.
Thou shalt mimic thy Advance sprite closely, and closely shalt thou mimic thy Advance sprite.

Now, say I'm going to revamp the Yellow version Scyther, since I'm being Scyther-obsessed in this guide. Here it is:

It doesn't look that bad for a sprite with only four colors, does it? However, if we make the background black instead of white...

Yellow version Scyther with dark background

...not anymore. See those dots around the outline? This is a problem in the older games, especially Yellow (there's a reason I chose the Yellow sprite for this tutorial). On a white background, like in the Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, this would smooth out the outline so it wouldn't look as jagged as it otherwise would. But on a dark background, this is a nightmare. I call those pixels Dots. (By the way, to my knowledge, I invented that term, so if you're going to talk about spriting to somebody, don't start going on about Dots unless you're absolutely certain that the person you're talking to has read this guide, okay?) Let's put it on a white background again to make it clearer what I'm doing, but knowing this, we'll of course fix the Dots a bit later. I'll make it a little larger, too:

See what the Dots are now? They're lighter pixels on the outer edges of the outline. Now, while this sprite has a lot of Dots, it has pretty good shading. It uses white for the highlights; the lighter shade of green for the base color; the darker shade of green for the shadows and outline highlights; and black for the outline and the very deepest shadows. Additionally the artist appears to have had a pretty good idea of where to shade and where not to shade. In Gold, Silver and Crystal, they put the right colors higher in priority than shading, so the shading in many G/S/C sprites is same as nothing apart from small white highlights. In R/B/Y, the two colors to use were two shades of the same hue, as the games were of course originally designed for the Gameboy that used only black, white and two shades of gray. Anyway, this means that we won't have to make the shading up, as is the case with G/S/C sprites. So we can now go and color the Scyther to be shaded exactly like the original Yellow version sprite, but with Ruby and Sapphire colors (don't think about the outline for now). We do that pixel by pixel with the Pencil tool, NOT with the Paint bucket tool, since we don't want to accidentally fill half of the wings with green. Then we color the entire outline black, including the Dots. Let's see how it looks now...

With the outlining black, however, it looks very 2-D and cartoony. That is, not how we want it to look. Plus, there are some clusters of black. To fix that, we take the base outlining shade for every color and color all of the outline except the shadows in that color, and remove the clusters.

Remember, you must not make Dots again! There are some in the R/S sprite, but do NOT put them on your revamp. You should, on the other hand, make Reverse Dots, as seen in this example from my fixed-up FR/LG Ninetales:

As you can see, there are darker pixels on the edges of the outline in some places. This will make the sprite look really smooth against a dark background, unlike the Dots which practically wreck it on a dark background. This does not make the sprite look less official either, nor does it ruin it on a light background, so there is no reason not to do it; the official sprites aren't perfect but you want your sprite to be. ;)

Let's see how our Scyther looks now with this applied to it...

Hmm, technically it doesn't look too bad. But what if we compare it to the R/S sprite?

Notice how the Yellow version one looks different from the R/S one. The wings are shaded differently on the R/S sprite, and the R/S one seems lighter. Why? Well, the original Yellow version Scyther had white highlights, which contrasted much more with the green main color. The highlights were really used to apply shine, so very little of them was used. The R/S Scyther, on the other hand, has the highlighting color all over. It is clear that we need to change the shading to the style of the official Scyther. Also, we'll need to do a bit of outline highlighting; put some of the shadow/outline highlight color on the outlines where they are very lightest, trying to keep the quantity of those similar to that on the R/S sprite. You should still not make Dots...

Also, we can look at the FR/LG sprite for reference for some more edits like in the face, since even though we're coloring it R/S style, the pose is a lot more similar to the FR/LG sprite (in fact, the FR/LG sprite is really a remake of the Yellow pose). That's where I got the red in the mouth from, too.

Whee, finished. Let's see it with a transparent background in normal size. Try looking at this in a style with a black background and noticing how it's even smoother than the R/S sprite, thanks to Reverse Dots...

Done! We changed this:

Into this:

Now, what about a Gold, Silver or Crystal sprite with practically no shading at all? Let's try the... *finds random G/S sprite she likes and hasn't revamped before, but has almost no shading* Silver Pikachu. Well, technically I don't really like it, since the arms bug me, but I was thinking about editing it to be good, anyway. Here it is, with the R/S sprite beside it:

Let's magnify it as usual:

See the Dots? Especially on the ears? We must clearly fix them. So, first things first: color and make the outline black.

Ick. See how it really doesn't look that much better than the original sprite? That's because there is almost no shading. Some people actually try to revamp Gold/Silver sprites, and just leave them like this! Don't do that. Ever.

Now, see those highlights? The spots that used to be white? They're facing the top left. (In fact, all Pokémon sprites have their light source in the top left, or rather top and the direction they're facing.) So clearly, that's where the light is coming from, and thus you shade exactly where it's not coming from. When you shade, you add the shadow color where the light would not fall. Pikachu is mostly made of curved surfaces, which means that the shading should also curve around the shape of the body. The tail is not curved; however, it is behind Pikachu and should therefore have a lot of shadowing except at the top. (Look at the R/S sprite for reference!) Like so:

Much better and more 3D. Now proceed to shade the cheeks and the stripes (look at the R/S sprite for reference again.) You see that the black ear tip is bigger on the R/S sprite than on this one's left ear (our right); therefore, make it a bit bigger before shading it. Look at the R/S face for reference when shading it, too. Oh, and some of the highlights look a bit awkward, so change them.

Outlining! Now, Pikachu has four shades in its outlines rather than three: there is one dark brown and one medium brown which both are darker than the light yellowish brown that is the actual shadow/outline highlight color. Treat the lighter of those two outline browns as an outline highlight color and the shadow color as an extreme highlight color, only for use on the very lightest areas. Incidentally, this lighter brown is also used on the R/S sprite for the extreme shadow on the foot - I can use it in that way on the revamp, too.

And now it should be finished. Let's look at it normal-sized and transparent:

Yup. This:

Into this:

And that concludes the revamping part. Get experienced at this, especially the shading part!

Splices

Splicing is when you splice together parts of two Pokémon sprites. There are really three types of splicing. When "adding parts", you're for example making a Pikachu with wings - you take a Pikachu, put wings on it, and then you have a sprite of a Pikachu with wings. When "mixing", you're maybe taking a Scyther and a Butterfree, and mixing them into one Scytherfree which has features from both, something you could picture as being the result of crossbreeding them. Basically, when adding parts, you are deliberately aiming for the result to look like one of the Pokémon you used with something added on it; when mixing, you should try to make it look equally like both. Then there's the "supersplice" in which you're not aiming for your Pokémon to look like any of the parts used. Generally, supersplices are spliced from a very large amount of parts, with pretty much one Pokémon for the body, one for the front legs, one for the back legs, one for the head shape, one for the muzzle, one for the ears, et cetera. They usually have a lot of scratch parts and edits, and I don't recommend doing them until you have quite a bit of experience in the field of mixing and adding parts.

The Rules of Splicing

Do NOT copy-flip. Copy-flipping is basically when, say, you put on one of Charizard's wings, and then you flip that wing and use it as the other wing too. As I said, don't.
DO flip parts if they are facing in one direction and your sprite is facing in the other.
DO recolor the end result to one color scheme.
DO edit the shading style to make sure all of the body parts colored with the same color match. This also applies if you've flipped any parts - you'll need to change the direction of the light source.
DO add in parts from scratch if some of a body part you're using was obscured on the original sprite but will not be on the splice.

Now, how do we splice?

Firstly, you need to get the sprites into your paint program, obviously. You might want to use both R/S and FR/LG sprites, maybe even Emerald ones or ones you've revamped (but ONLY if you can honestly look at your revamp and the official sprite side by side and not tell which is which except for recognizing the pose). Here, I'm going to do an Electabuzz/Aerodactyl splice (generated by the random Pokémon generator), I'm going to use the FR/LG sprites for it, and I may use parts from my revamped Gold version sprite, so I'm opening that too for safety. For now I can't be bothered to use the R/S sprites or anything too. [screenshot]

Now, decide which parts you want to use for the splice. I have decided that I want Electabuzz's little antennae, the hair on its head, the markings, probably the sides of the head, the end of the tail, the claws, and the arms, while keeping everything on Aerodactyl except the end of the tail and the horns. Then remove everything you're not going to use - just erase it carefully, making sure to remove everything you were going to remove and nothing you weren't going to remove. Don't do it if the part is covering up some of an area you're going to use, though - you can erase what's not covering it, but keep the exact part that's covering it intact. Again, for safety, if you're using many sprites from different games, erase those parts from all of the different sprites. Now, in my case, even though the markings and sides of the head are probably going to be drawn on Aerodactyl itself, I'll still need the sprites for reference, so I'm not erasing any of them, but note that in Paint, I highly recommend just making extra copies of the sprites if you want reference and erasing from the original copies, because in Paint, the lasso tool is not very precise and therefore it's very hard to select what you want completely but without any extra pixels.

Now you should have all the parts for your splice ready. [screenshot]

Next, select the parts with the lasso tool [screenshot] and get them onto each other. In Paint, you have to drag the part you want to be in front onto the part that you want behind. In a layered paint program, you can just copy the parts, paste them into the other image, and then drag it around independently and switch the order of the layers. Place the parts carefully - if you're putting on a new tail, don't make it come out of the back unless you're intentionally making a freaky splice. Don't mind the gaps that may be left in there somewhere - placing the parts so that the sprite looks right is more important than leaving no gaps, because you'll fill them in anyway. Now we have the first version of our Aerobuzz, the way some *cough* spriters would leave it - you don't really need to see the Electabuzz anymore, so no more screenshots:

But we're not just some spriters. After you're satisfied with the overall image of your sprite, you can start filling in the gaps - from scratch. Basically, you draw in any missing parts pixel by pixel with the pencil tool, and make carefully sure to shade them - see the revamping part, which you should have read, on shading both body and outlines. Usually these parts will be small; if they aren't, I suggest you change your plans for the splice until you're a bit more experienced. In my case, it's mainly the right (our left) arm, but I'm also erasing a pixel from the tail end that looked odd, and don't forget to edit out the parts that you weren't going to use but were on top of some you were going to use.

Anyway, when you've drawn those in, it's time to recolor. When mixing, you'll usually want to use the colors of the sprite that's less prominent in the mix as it is so far - which is almost always the accessory Pokémon rather than the base. In this case, that would be Electabuzz, and I've already assumed that with my plan to give it Electabuzz's markings. When adding parts, you'll on the other hand want to use the colors of the base, since the desired effect is not to make it look like both of the Pokémon spliced. For supersplices, the colors are often taken from a completely different Pokémon or made up (see the recoloring part of this guide).

But as I said, this is a mix we're talking about, and therefore we're going to recolor it with Electabuzz's colors. We do that exactly as we'd have done it if we were simply recoloring a normal sprite to another color. (i.e. go read that recoloring guide if you haven't already. Now.)

But no, no, no, don't stop yet, even if you have no plans to start putting on markings. There may be slight oddities in the shading now - maybe you flipped a part so now the shading is backwards, or you put a part somewhere and now it would cast a shadow onto the rest of the body, or a part used to be shadowed by another body part but isn't anymore. Additionally, the shading style might be different between the Pokémon that you used - one might then look darker than the other (see the revamping guide). Therefore, you might want to change the shading a bit to fit better in your splice. I'm going to edit the outlines and take out some pesky Dots, but you don't need to if you don't want to - they're official flaws, after all.

Now, since I was going to use the markings, I'm adding them on. Obviously, I need to adapt them to the surface of Aerodactyl's body, and shade them like on Electabuzz. This is probably the hardest part of this particular splice. When working in a layered paint program, I highly recommend putting markings and such on a new layer. Oh, and I changed the claws into Electabuzz-like claws, as I intended.

Now our Aerobuzz is ready to roll!

Adding parts and supersplicing will not be specially covered here, but the method is the same - only real difference is how you end up coloring it. Have fun splicing.

Pixel-Overs

What is a pixel-over? Well, it is when you take an existing image, resize it to be sprite-sized, and then pixel by pixel draw another image on top of it that imitates its outlines and basically turns out looking like a sprite version of the image. If that was a bit hard to understand, I've got some examples of my own (which you shall NOT steal), made from Sugimori art:

For comparison, here is the actual Sugimori art, courtesy of Pokémon Forever's Pokédex, of those two (excuse the gray background that Internet Explorer will see):

As you can see, the colors are different - on my pixel-overs, I used the colors from the Ruby and Sapphire sprites - but the pose is the same. Also, a trained eye might notice that the pixel-overs are a bit larger than official sprites - this is because I randomly decided to do that, but you don't need to if you don't want to.

Pixel-overs are, in a way, "pseudo-scratching". The outline's shape is not yours, but the sprite technically is - you did not use any parts from other sprites to make it. The next step would be to draw your own poses and make pixel-overs from them - then you technically have a scratch sprite. That will obviously not be covered specifically, because the method is the exact same as when you use other art for pixel-overing.

Now, to start with, just find some suitable art to pixel-over. I'm going to continue my Sugimori series for this guide, but other official art you can pixel-over from is for example trading card art. Then, of course, if you do have some nice pictures that you drew yourself, even better. But I'm going to make a Scyther pixel-over. (Fwee, Scyther!)

First off, we need to resize it [screenshot]. The size I like to have for my Sugimori pixel-overs is something like roughly 140-160 pixels when the dimensions are put together, so I made it this. The official Advance sprites are 64x64 pixels at the most, and the D/P sprites are 80x80. Also note that I chose to make the result jagged even though ImageReady has the ability to make it smooth - this will make the outline easier to follow. To get the resizing option, go to Image > Image Size in ImageReady/Photoshop; in Paint, you can go to Image > Stretch/Skew and then stretch.

When you're a beginner, make it relatively small. Scratch spriting and pixel-overing, whether you believe it or not, are an art form where the difficulty of creating one depends much more on the size of the sprite than on anything else. I've seen a list of spriter "ranks", where in order to be an "expert" one had to be able to create 100x100 pixel-overs from 2000x2000 images, with it noted that "the smaller, the better". This is not true. Making a 200x200 pixel-over of an image is not only harder than a 100x100 one, but expontentially so, and not only because you have so many more pixels that you need to consider one at a time, but because there are all sorts of things you can get away with in a small sprite but not in a bigger one. Sure, it is more difficult to fit details into a 100x100 image than a 200x200 one, but fitting proper detail from a decently detailed 2000x2000 image onto a 100x100 is simply impossible and thus can not be a sign of skill. As long as the pixel-over is large enough to fit the detail you need on, for the love of all things holy don't make it larger than that for the hell of it until you really know what you're doing.

Anyway, now that it's small, magnify it. Choose a darkish color that does not appear in the sprite - black is fine in some cases, but not all - and start tracing the outline of the art. (In layered programs, do this on a new layer.) You don't need to follow it exactly if doing so would make the outline look worse - all the advice given in the outlining guide in the In-Depth Tutorials section to make an outline look smooth is more important than making each particular pixel exactly like it is in the original art.

Basically, unless that's the desired effect, never do the examples on the left, and do it like it is on the right. Do not drag the pencil tool; draw one pixel at a time. You may also have to do "pseudo-outlines"; basically, use a different color, not necessarily dark but still one clearly distinguishable from the art, to mark a narrow area that will be separated from the rest only by color separation but not with an actual outline, such as the green edge on Scyther's scythes and wings (see sprite below). This generally applies to anything that is only one pixel wide. There, it would look very messy if you tried to do that outline in the same color as the rest of the outline; just color the area completely in the color of your choice.

Now, I've finished the outline roughly, and then it's time to erase the original art. (It's often good to keep a copy of it somewhere for reference with the shading, though.) Then make the outlines black if they weren't already. Here's how it looks:

Coloring time. Using the Paint Bucket tool, color the whole sprite with the darkest shade you're going to use. (Well, again, I like to start with the darkest, but if your preference is different, by all means use it.) Of course, our Scyther doesn't look particularly good after this treatment...

But no worries; we're about to fix that. Now, using the technique described in the revamping guide, add the base color on top of the shadow color. Scyther is already looking better...

And then, finally, it's the highlighting.

Now that that's done, we can shade the outlines, again using the technique described in the revamping guide, and Scyther is done.

Scratch Sprites

When scratch spriting, you basically draw the sprite from scratch with the Pencil tool instead of pixeling over an image. For very small scratch spriting, you'll usually be fine with drawing it pixel by pixel, but for anything around the size of a Pokémon sprite, it is better to just drag the pencil tool and draw. However, I still recommend magnifying while drawing the outline. Now, for the sake of the guide, I'm going to make a scratch sprite of my fake Pokémon Scorplack.

So, what I start off with is magnifying the 64x64 canvas (for an Advance-sized sprite; for a D/P-sized one, it would be 80x80) and drawing the Scorplack's head. It's a scorpion Pokémon, and the head is shaped somewhat like this:

See how messy and ugly it is? It's meant to be. Now we're going to smoothen it out and make the outline one pixel wide by erasing some pixels from it and if I need to adding a few more pixel by pixel. The general rules for how to get an outline to look smooth are shown in the outlining guide in the In-Depth Tutorials section.

There, much better. Now we'll add the remaining segments of the body and the sharp tail stinger using the same method, drawing and smoothing one segment at a time. I also moved it to the right because I want to be able to fit its legs on.

Now, for the legs... It's a better idea to draw them pixel by pixel, because they're very narrow. So one pixel at a time, I draw a leg coming out of each segment of the actual body. I'll start with the ones on its right side (our left), since they won't be overlapping the body:

Here I committed the sin of making all the legs the same, but it doesn't matter in this case - we're dealing with a set of identical, narrow legs that probably wouldn't be different enough to make a whole pixel's worth of difference. That being said, I'm also going to use that to excuse that I (gasp) copy-flipped this same leg for the other side of the body. Bad me. But hey, the shading is going to be different, so nobody will notice. =P

Now, it's the hardest part of this sprite: the pincers. Now, I suspect they will completely wreck the whole thing, so I'm making them on a new layer. If using Paint, you should copy and paste a safety copy of the sprite before adding anything you think might ruin it.

Hmm, didn't turn out as bad as I thought it might. As you can see, that was extremely rough; when you're drawing you should always be rough, since you are always going to fix up the detail anyway. I'm going to smooth the lines, but not add the details yet.

Now I'm going to take a good look at it and make sure there is nothing else I want to add on it or anything I want to move around or anything, and once I've decided I'm satisfied, I'll merge my layers and finish the pincers.

Now, Scorplack is black, so I'm making a blueish black color for it. It also has glowing yellow spots on its head that look like eyes; that color won't be hard to do. That's all the colors there are in the sprite.

Of course, it's kinda hard to see like this, but that's what shading is for. Oh, and Scorplack's armor shines, which means that we have lots of the shadow color to bring out the normal color more.

Now, some highlighting.

Again because Scorplack is shiny, it will look best if we take an even lighter color - quite a bit much lighter than this one - and use that for the very lightest spots to apply a clear shiny effect. I'm also adding a bit of shading to the "eyes".

Now it's outlining time. On such a dark sprite, the outlining isn't going to show very much, but I like doing it anyway and it adds a tiny bit more depth. Now, because we're working with very dark colors, I'm not going to use a base outlining color at all - the outline will be black for the most part, using some of the shadow color on Scorplack itself and a little bit of the base color. Then I just transparentize the sprite, and it's done!

Other Spriting Categories

This is just a short alphabetical list of other types of spriting and some of the definitions of them.

Customs: Usually sprites that might be made from a base, but have been edited beyond recognition.
Devamps: A newer sprite that has been colored down to the two-color (besides black and white) palette of G/S/C or the two-shade monotone palette of R/B/Y. Often, at least in the case of R/B/Y devamps, they have been edited to the sort of weird spriting style that most of the R/B Pokémon had.
Disguises: Sometimes referred to as "extreme recolors" or something of the sort, but basically one Pokémon that has been edited to the full color scheme of another including markings, details, etc.
Edits: Normal sprites that have been edited slightly in some way or another, such as by closing a mouth, adding a necklace or whatever.
Overshades: Sprites that have been edited to have more shades than the ones they originally had.
Posers: Pretty much disguises taken to the extreme, where the sprite is actually edited to the point of showing another Pokémon in the base's pose.
Type changes: Sometimes called re-elements. Basically, a Pokémon is taken and edited to look like it is of a different type than it really is. A well done type change usually contains scratch parts as well as bits of other Pokémon.

In-Depth Tutorials

Outlining

Here we will cover the nitty-gritty details of making an outline. This is not a matter of outline shading but simply creating the outline itself - thus, it mostly matters for those planning to make scratch sprites, pixel-overs, or something else they will be doing extensive scratch outlining in.

The Golden Rule of Outlining

Do not use the shape tools in your paint program.

I'm serious. That circle tool may look awfully tempting, but don't use it. The computer quite literally draws the closest pixel approximation to a perfect circle, but this is not always the best representation of a circle. Why? Because the computer is not a brain. Brains don't care how closely it approximates the mathematical definition of a circle. Brains care whether they can properly see the jumble of little colored dots on the screen as a circle, and to do this the circle above all needs to be smooth. Here are four circles, two 16x16 pixels and two 24x24 pixels:

The circles on the left are drawn with Microsoft Paint's circle tool. The circles on the right are drawn by hand. Which look better? The ones on the right. Why? Because the ones on the left are drawn from a purely mathematical standpoint on circles. The ones on the right aren't shaped quite like real circles, but you can't really see it and your brain likes them better because their outline is smoother.

Lesson learned: Draw by hand when you make pixel art. Do not use those silly tools. They may know their math just fine, but they don't know how to fool a human brain.

Straight Lines

Anyone can draw an (approximately) straight line on paper, but there is slightly more to it when you're spriting. As you may have noticed when you have been working with pixels, the only real lines you can make are horizontal and vertical ones, by simply placing pixels by one another's side as seen below (in the corner is the true size of the 4x magnified version in the main image):

But you won't get very far in the spriting world drawing nothing but squares, and that's why somebody made the genius discovery that if you draw a little bit of a horizontal line with another little bit of a horizontal line following it immediately but just a slight bit above it, and then yet another bit of a horizontal line a little bit above that, and so on, it ends up looking like a diagonal line:

Diagonal lines made out of segments of horizontal and vertical lines of varying sizes

And this is basically the core of straight lines in pixel art. You're drawing tiny segments of horizontal or vertical lines but shift each segment one pixel vertically or horizontally so that it touches the corner of the previous segment. When making straight lines, each segment at first glance appears to need to be equally long, which would severely limit your possibilities of angles for these straight lines, but it is not so; they can also have some segments one pixel longer than the others such that they appear in a regular pattern. This may sound complicated, but it isn't. The line below, for example, is one of the simpler possible such lines. The segment lengths in it alternate between being 1 and 2:

A diagonal line made from a pattern of horizontal segments

How effective this is at conveying your line depends on a few factors including the segment lengths, the pattern you're using, and the length of the line - generally, shorter lines with a greater difference in the number of segments of each length used (such as if a line has ten single-pixel segments for each two-pixel segment) are likely to look less and less like a straight line at your desired slope and more like a straight line at a slightly different slope with a little bump on it. This is the reason why sometimes you will take the licence of using a simpler slope in order to prevent such a bump from appearing; to use our previous example, you would instead simply make it into a line in which all the segments consist of one pixel in order to get a smoother line.

But straight lines are not really what you are going to be drawing, although they certainly help to understand the rest. You'll probably want to move on to...

Curves

Pokémon are curvy. All living creatures are curvy. You aren't going to be drawing a lot of straight lines when making Pokémon sprites, unless you're making a Porygon.

So why did I babble on about straight lines before getting to the stuff you're going to be using? Because, well, essentially curves are just lines whose "slope" is constantly changing. To explain better, imagine we've got a nice, round curve like this:

Now, a true circle, as mathematically defined, has a "slope" that changes constantly as you move along the circumference of the circle. But just like we have to settle for portraying diagonal lines with oodles of little segments of horizontal and vertical lines when we're making pixel art, a pixel art circle is only a rough approximation of a true circle - you can make small pixel art of what is essentially an octagon, for example, but the brain will interpret it as a circle anyway provided that it's small enough. This quarter of a "circle" in particular, being relatively small, changes its slope only four times - it is essentially a part of a hexadecagon or sixteen-sided polygon. Here it is with each "side" colored so that you see what I mean:

These, as you can see, are all "simple" slopes - all the segments in each "side" are the same length. The brain, however, the wonderful thing it is, knows that you can make every imaginable slope using a pattern as I detailed above, and will simply assume that each pixel in the hexadecagon really has a "slope" different from those around it, but you see too little of the "line" to be able to see the segments of it that would be some different length. Basically the brain promptly decides that while it is just a bunch of little dots and their form technically looks more like a hexadecagon than anything else, it's probably supposed to be a circle, because come on, who ever draws a hexadecagon? And the brain, like so often, is right. For short: you draw a curve by drawing something that will, to the brain, look vaguely like the slope is gradually changing at each point of it, and as long as you've done that, the brain of the viewer will, conveniently, fill in the blanks for you so that you won't have to worry about them anymore.

So how do you make a line that to a brain looks vaguely like the slope is gradually changing with each point of it? Simply by making it gradual enough for the brain to fill in the blanks correctly. Look at the following two pictures:

Now, it should be obvious to anyone that the curvy line on the left is all smooth and nice and the not-curvy one on the right is not. To figure out what it is exactly that makes them so, it would be wise to look through the lines from start to finish. Here I will assume that their "start" is there in the top right corner. The first noteworthy difference we encounter as we travel along the line, then, is how in the one on the right, a horizontal line segment of a length greater than one connects directly with a vertical segment of a length greater than one. This is more or less a no-no when trying to make smooth curves. If you start with a horizontal line and a vertical line with some space between them and a simple curve is going to connect them both, there will pretty much have to be at least one "neutral" single-pixel segment to connect the horizontal segments of the curve and the vertical ones in order to make the brain buy it. This can work with very small parts, like "circles" that are under six pixels in diameter, but in anything larger, the brain will feel more inclined to assume that a horizontal segment directly joined with a vertical one is simply supposed to be a corner. As you move on to still bigger shapes in your pixel art, it will also cease to be enough to have only one single-pixel segment in between them to make it look smooth, but thankfully, the shapes you will be working with in Pokémon sprites are mostly smaller than that.

The next difference between the two curves that we encounter as we go along the lines, and this one is serious, is that there is an actual corner on the line on the right. It should be obvious that corners are not something we want to put in a curve. As far as the brain is concerned, a corner - that is, a horizontal and vertical segment actually joined together into one such that they have one pixel in common - is pretty explicit, and no matter what you do with the rest of the line, you will never make a viewer's brain see that particular bit of it as anything remotely approaching curvy. You'll see if you look at the actual size version of the line on the right that where the corner is you see a very clear "spike". Ouch. There are absolutely no exceptions to the no-corners-in-curves rule, period, but thankfully it's not very hard to follow as long as you're following the Golden Rule of Outlining described above.

Now, the third difference between these two lines is "indecisiveness", which may also be called "complex slope syndrome" depending on how you look at it or if you prefer a more technical-sounding name (not that I didn't just make both of them up on the spot). When we examine these two lines, we assume that both of them were going for approximately the same kind of S-shape (which on the non-curvy line, thanks to its non-curviness, looks more like a demented 5). Now, let's look at the next "line" of the shape in particular, highlighted in red:

There are two ways in which we can interpret the mistake made in the red part on the image on the right. If we are going to call it "indecisiveness", what is happening in this line is that it is made up of horizontal segments whose lengths go 3-1-2-2-1. In an S-shape, as we can see on the image on the left, the shape is meant to go is to go smoothly from more vertical to less vertical to more vertical again as it goes downwards, but in the image on the right, it goes from being less vertical from being more so to being less again and then more vertical again. Even with the rather too horizontal three-pixel starting segment of this line on the image on the right, the correct way to go about making the rest of the shape would have been to simply go from less vertical to more so, as the more vertical part at the beginning has already been ruined. Instead, there is an additional and unnecessary change in the shape with having it become less vertical again and then again more vertical, basically making a bump in the curve.

That is if we look at it from the "indecisiveness" perspective. From the "complex slope syndrome" perspective, things are simpler to explain but a lot more mathematical: in the image on the right, there is a "straight line" in the shape that is long enough to reveal that it is a "complex slope", one with multiple different segment lengths, and because it's such a small straight line, this comes out as a "bump" as described earlier in the section about straight lines. Instead, this "straight line"'s slope should simply be changed so that it actually is simple. This would be easy by moving the rightmost pixel of the topmost segment of the red line down, i.e. taking one off the three-pixel segment and adding to the one-pixel segment, such that all of the line segments save the last one are two pixels long. In this particular case, we're trying to make a curve, not a straight line, but in complex shapes like Pokémon, you may very well land yourself in the situation of having an actual straight line somewhere in the outline, in which case you'll have to watch out for complex slope syndrome if the line isn't long enough for it to look good.

Now, let's look at the last pixel of this red line on the image on the right. This is not a corner, but it's a point - a single-pixel segment whose adjacent segments are both shifted in the same direction. Points, like corners, just do not belong anywhere in a curve unless the curve is very small or extremely steep such that there is no other way to do it.

After the point, the right image has what is simply a straight line. This straight line cannot pass as a part of a particularly wide curve because it has a point on one end of it and an abrupt angle on the other where the diagonal line meets the horizontal segment at the bottom. The lines here are long enough for the brain to have established them as straight lines (at least the diagonal one), which is bad for curviness in itself, but it also makes it see the angle as, well, an angle. The same happens at the other end of the horizontal line, although it is not as noticeable because the diagonal line there is shorter. It is miraculous what could be fixed here by simply shifting the rightmost pixel of the horizontal line up by one pixel. This applies increasingly the longer the straight lines being joined are, and is basically the same principle as the one about not having horizontal segments meet vertical segments directly. Always keep this in mind when making outlines.

I believe this is just about everything that should be avoided at all costs when making a curve, and it is what will allow you to make smooth curves like that left one instead of ugly ones like the right one. As a bit of 'homework', you can try taking that right line and smoothing it out to more of a curve - it wouldn't look exactly like the curve on the left, because they were drawn as unrelated shapes, but it would be similarly smooth.

Angles

Now, what if there actually is a sharp point or angle on something - how would you go about portraying that in a sprite? Well, presumably you're not actually asking yourself that, since I've already mentioned corners and points and this is kind of obvious, but I'll cover it anyway.

There are more or less two ways to convey an angle in an outline. Firstly there is the corner:

This, as mentioned in the curve part, is when a horizontal and a vertical segment are joined by sharing one pixel whose actual sides touch the rest of both segments, and is pretty good at conveying sharp points such as claws on a Pokémon. The other type is the point, also mentioned in the curve part, which is where a single-pixel segment joins two adjacent segments that are both shifted to the same side of it:

So what's the difference and when to use which? Well, corners must invariably face either the top left, top right, bottom left or bottom right, and points must invariably face either up, down, right or left. There is no way to get around this. It is simply a fact of life, and it lets you point your angles in any of eight directions. If you desperately need the very tip to point in some other direction, tough luck. There are a few other ways to convey angles with pixels, but none of them work properly for actual outlines, so really, this is it.

Hopefully this has taught you something about outlining, or rather shaping an outline to look halfway decent.

Closing words

Good luck spriting! Remember, the golden rule of everything creative is to practice and not to give up - my first sprites were horrible. If you think you can't sprite and are about to give up, just remember that if you sprite for long enough, you'll be great in the end.

Page last modified December 06 2007 at 00:06 GMT