Um, just so that you guys know: I swear often and needlessly in this post. If you have a problem with that, sorry, put it through a filter or something .-.Alright, to everyone who wants to sprite a sprite: you are an admirable person. if you have experience in pixelling, i'd recommend it just to broaden your skills. But this article or whichever isn't just about starting completely from scratch, i'm talking about edits here too. So i'm going to reveal every goddamn detail about spriting that i can think of. Now you might think "But K3, you suck shit at spriting!" Yes, i do. I'm only going to teach you theory here and even if it doesn't help me that doesn't mean it won't help you. Also, if you are nessiah or any other RM2k3 spriting god then you probably know this already, this is basic shit.
FIRSTLY, a tip to you admirable starting from scratch types. Know what you want before you start from scratch. If you want a rm2k3 style sprite, don't start from scratch. the first thing you have to do is create a base and then work from there. However, if you want to make your own kind of sprite, a whole new style, you should know: animations are a bitch. If you have no experience regarding animation, then this process may be frustrating. Please don't give up, i love you already for being such a trooper ;_;.
However, if you have no experience regarding animation, you should probably get some. The first step is figuring out how this rm2k3 spriting business works. Skip this if you already know how the charasets work, this will be boring otherwise.
First of all, the above is a basic charset. You may wonder what a charset is. A charset is the term RPG makers use for the image RPG maker compiles into a walking animation. it's 288 x 256 with 96 24x32 cells for eight hero walking animations. So, let's look at each hero walking animation in detail.
this little guy is Alex. He's a historical little figure from RM2K, the default main hero. Please respect him, he's pretty old (For the internet, anyhow -,o) anyways, the basic spritesheet has three frames of animation, the middle being the default position (Standing). The first row faces up, the second faces right, the third faces down, and the last faces right. One interesting thing to note is that the right and left facings are reversals of each other, i'd remember that for later.
Alright, before you do any basic human spriting, You're going to need a base. Rm2k and 2k3 bases are easy to find floating around the internet, but to understand the process it may be a good idea to make your own. Now, rm2k3 is not a very detailed program (Remember we're only dealing with 24x32 sprites) so i would not recommend making separate female and male bases considering (please excuse what i am about to say) you only have around nine pixels max to make a boob. so let's just make a single, unisex base out of alex up there, and if you want to make your sprite anorexic later then you can just shave the pixels off when the time comes.(the reverse if you want to make your sprite morbidly obese .-.)
firstly, get yourself a palette to work with. this is best gathered from the colours used for the sprite's face, as the widest array of colours are usually used there. Please take note of the darkest colour, usually a different hue is used for this colour, it is used for the outline of the character. also, pay attention to the techniques used for shading and such, as your base should look authentic. To start, i'm going to use the front view because quite frankly, i feel like it. (If you yourself want to, then you could start with a side view, although i wouldn't use the back view quite yet.)
then you have to get past all of that hair, and find the head underneath it. a good way to approximate the height of the head is to measure the distance from the bottom of the head to the eyes, then doubling it. an artistic rule of thumb is to keep the eyes in the middle of the face, and using that can help to get the hair out of the way. Remember when making your head to keep it symmetrical.
alright, after you have a general shape of head (notice that i ditched the measure of the head, remember that that is only an estimate) and now that alex is bald, most of that shading is pretty much moot so fix that up, make him a nice looking baldy
alright, that's all for now, comment folks
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