A bunch of tips for recolors, shadowing, frankenspriting and Full Custom Spriting
Recolors
For some odd reason you'll end up having to change the color of a sprite(This actually applies to all images), likely because you have the image you want, but it needs to have yellow hair or African American skin. This will give you tips on this
Gimp has a tool, "Select by Color" it appears as a hand over the three base colors red, blue, and green. This tool allows you to select all pixels of the same color in a image, this speeds up recoloring considerably. To change that color use the colorize tool or colorify, each may be suited for different tasks; you just have to experiment.
Sometimes Select by Color doesnt work right for your current project. You can use the paint button or brush(preferably the paint button in my opinion) and use the "Multiply" mode to apply a hue on the image while retaining the shadowed areas and lighting. I personally spam this all the time, very useful for custom spriting.
Using the "Burn/Dodge" tool you can increase the lightness of the image or darken it, this is helpful if you only want part of a image to change.
Shadowing
When doing a custom sprite, having shading done right is critical, it might be a small effect but a effect that should be done right
When do create the shadow, try to image were the sun would be.
Avoid pillow shading, or when you create a shadow that seems like the sun is directly over the sprite (shadowing from all sides)
Don't make the shades so dark or light that they are hard to see the difference.
Like I said, using the multiply tool saves you the hassle of shadowing.
Frankenspriting
It lives!!! From taking pieces of sprites and putting them back together you create a new sprite!
Using the Select by Color Tool in conjunction with the delete button you can remove whole sections of a sprite. However this may also lead to random faults in the sprite depending on the range of colors.
When you cut and paste into a new image, make sure it is aligned so that there isn't jiggling when using the sprite.
Full Custom Spriting
It will enhance your game tremendously
When making a template to use, make sure that it is consistent, proper shading is applied to the appropriate body parts and specifically desired, avoid big heads, small arms and legs.
When spriting make sure that the colors you use are pleasing to the eye, make all similar colors look natural from the 100 viewpoint(just a sidenote, I reccomend working on a 800 viewpoint)
I usually flip the downward and upward walking frames so as to lessen the time spent spriting, however you add something that sticks to the side( scarf, wierd hairstyle, glove) DON'T FLIP THE SPRITE! You'll have to sprite it manually
Scarfs and similar items move walking because of the wind. If you want to go a extra mile, have a idle animation where it moves.
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