Setting Up

First, open up Microsoft Paint or the equivalent. Zoom in until you're at 500% (or on MS Paint, all the way). Make white Color 1, and black Color 2, then Fill with black. The whole canvas should be black. Get out the pencil tool and set it to the smallest size, and you're ready to sprite!

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Making the Head

For demonstration purposes, we're going to make Jeremy Nubian from Flames of the Desert. (That's one of my games.) So first, let's draw in the shape of his head. Not too big, not too small, maybe ~11x11 pixels. Might wanna go pixel for pixel on the outside, then Fill the center.

Now we'll make the hair. Unless you want a character with a mohawk or a braid, this will be simple. Just go along the outside of the character's head, and pleeease make it go in front of their head. Like an anime character where some of their hair is in the front and their hair isn't all back. Unless they have a ponytail or something. It should still go a bit in front though. If you want light hair, fill it in white and leave a black line between the hair and the face to show shadowing, if you want dark hair, just don't do those things.

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Making the Chest, Torso, Arms, Legs, and Shoes

This one is pretty easy now that you're probably in the swing of things. The neck should be about 5px wide and go 2px before the shoulders, 1px at the shoulder line, and 2px below, but rounded at the sides at the bottom, unless your character's wearing a turtleneck!

For the arms, I'd reccommend a sloping design like the one I did here: it gets steeper and steeper like a chart showing fast growth of something. the wrists should be 5px wide and however long you think is realistic (I only did 11px because Jeremy's wearing long sleeves).

For the chest and torso, I just make two vertical srtaight lines 11px apart, and trace them down around 22px, give or take depending on the character's height.

The legs go down 13px or so, then the pants hang down 2 more. the legs are about 5px wide and 7px long. The shoes can be whatever you want.

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Re-sizing!

You won't want to put a a sprite in your game that's too small, so here's what to do:

-Zoom out to 100%
-Re-size the picture to be huge
-Select the sprite
-Right click on it and click 'Resize'
-Resize it to like 480% by 480%
-Click Crop
-And you're done!

If you want to add color, you can do that. If, not, leave it black and white. I'd highly recommend coloring things like colored lights, magic, fire, and blood.

http://www.gdunlimit...bit06-29550.png