Thank you very much! I created the majority of sprites mostly from scratch using Jasc Paintshop Pro, although several were adapted from graphics I found on the web, had suitable color and I thought looked neat.
For creating sprites, I use at least an 1200% zoom and work pixel by pixel, using an unzoomed preview box to keep track of how the sprite looks normally. Some tips:
- Keep in mind that most of the time your sprite will be seen against the light background of a menu rather than the dark one of combat. Always check out how the sprite looks in light gray/brown before finishing it.
- Take screenshots from DomII and use the eye dropper tool to ensure the skin-tones of your humans look alright.
- A normal human uses close to or all of the 32 pixels of height alloted him or her. The first set of sprites I created for Ashikaga were a full 16 pixels too short, and looked like dwarves.
- Horses are really hard to draw in such a way that they don't look shabby when compared to the ones Illwinter made. Cut what you need of a horse from screenshots then resize or modify them as necessary.
- Texture is really important for clothes, armor, and metal weapons. Even small areas of monotone color are usually obvious and tend to look shabby. A cheap way of avoiding this is to add a texture filter to your brush, but I would advise against it unless you're trying to fill a truly large area because the difference in quality is significant.
- The magnified sprite looks very little like what will appear in game, always judge your progress by the unzoomed Version.