So I got a question asking for tips on how to do sprite art as I'd done work on FuBN years back. Having put a bit of effort in on the answer I figured I would share it more broadly so it could be used a general resource.

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Okay, I did a little illustration to try and show how I would something like this today; my method back then would've been focused on assiduous pixel placement. While the results of such an approach can be good it's generally pretty labor intensive and time consuming.

These days my approach would be something like this (referring to the above image):

Initially a quick blocking out phase; if I were actually trying to set this up for something real I would likely use a number of separate layers so I could tweak each part . Blocking out like this has a number of advantages, in particular it allows one to get a good silhouette without getting bogged down in details, and additionally it's pretty fast to do for basically the same reason.

The next phase would center on a secondary round of blocking in, this time to get the main forms of whatever you're trying to depict. This is also when you're probably gonna start picking a palette for the sprite. This should also be relatively quick since the main focus is just getting the main shapes you want to convey jotted down. Since we're focused on getting just rough details in place being super precise is not really necessary, but you'll want to be neat enough that you don't confuse yourself later, particularly if you take a break and come back to the project.

In any case from there it's mainly a process of continuation and refinement; expand the palette as needed unless you're sticking to hard limits. The main focus is on bringing out details in a way that is clear and which compliments the forms.

A few additional notes:
Palette selection is very, very important in creating readable and good looking artwork to begin with, and this is even more the case for sprites since they tend to be small and thus finding out details can be difficult. Picking colors which contrast well will help considerably, though I prefer to slightly exaggerate these color shifts.

Secondly there are couple of techniques which you may wish to employ which might help produce good looking sprites. These are celout and dithering; both can be somewhat labor intensive. I largely did not use them here, but for references sake celout describes a process of manually dithering around the edges of color blocks and the sprite itself in order to create a fading effect between different areas. Think of it as manual anti-aliasing.

Dithering is a method of creating the impression of a third color with only two colors by having them fill alternating pixels in a diagonal grid pattern, which creates a blending effect (particularly on older crt monitors.) This is not a technique I ever particularly mastered, however the effects can look quite good if done properly.

Also, though it is beyond the scope of this post there are tools (mainly filters) that, depending on the program you're using, can be utilized to automate some of these processes, which can be useful for streamlining production.

Hopefully this is of some help.

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