Hello and good day. I have decided to atleast try to become a half-decent spriter. I figured "hell, if its just boxes, I can do it."

Noticing my utter lack of anything than sub-zero Lua skills I think I belong infront of the pallet as I feel the need to contribute.

So I am looking for "bones" from the more experienced masters. What program should I use? What is good in away it isnt Bureau-Dull or flat out outrageous? the general spriting theme in CC?

I think I could figure it out by trial and error but considering my learning curve..

First download Graphics Gale
http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/us/

Making weapons sprites:

- First open another weapon sprite and then use it as base.
- Second you must use one thing called "shading".
Q:So what it's "shading"?
A:Shading it's you making shadow and light effects
Q:But how?
A:Using darker and lighter pixels , just see another sprites.
- Third using too darker pixels , isn't cool.
- Fourth don't make your weapon too long.
- Fifth try to get one color scheme.

This may helps.

Graphics gale he got spot on, it's awesome and you hsould use it.
For starters I would reccomend you try stuff like adding shapes together and shading them from varied angles.
With art like pixelart, don't just do it, imagine it inside your head.

First of all, take everything CC said with a grain of salt; his grossly shallow simplification is misleading. That said, you could start editing a vanilla sprite, or you could also just start from scratch. Make sure you have some vanilla sprites around to consult for size and proportion. There's no quick and easy way I know of to become great, which is obvious because if I did I'd at least be good at spriting. Just sprite a lot I guess. I don't know of any other way. Consulting MLC is also a good idea, but don't bother him until you've got something slightly presentable.

Your first step is to not worry about it.

If you're not enjoying the act of creating the art (or, at least, the end result) then it's not really worth doing it.

In the meantime, don't worry too much about making everything work perfectly and look great.

Sticking to palettes is good practice, but not required for an early stage in the game. Keeping to CC's size/shape limits your total number of pixels to a paltry number that actually makes it fairly poor practice.

Go ahead, make your first gun the size of a house. Who cares? It's your sprite; do what you want.

Just, y'know, don't expect your first sprite (or your first dozen. or your first hundred) to be the best anyone's ever seen.

If you like the process and get into it, you'll get better naturally. Tutorials can help with the basics, but like any art, you've either "got it" or you don't.

Wow.. A good amount of replies. I'm going to just practice for now, being happy if I know what it's supposed to be in the end. Thank you all, from now as we say it in here "Its all in the wrist"

And Panzer( this remenber me the SS Panzer division and remenber Natti too )
read what Contrary says , she it's one awesome spriter , all her sprites are beautiful.

One last question.. What general size should I make then? Or just keep to the general size of the vanilla?

Yes try keeping the vanilla size , if you want to make new images you will need to learn to put them in pallete.

For usability reasons, that's good practice.
Some artists like to do very detailed and large graphics and then scale them down gently afterwards to get to sprite size. This has mixed results, as you can lose a lot of detail which defines the object. It can help with shading though.

Yes , more space = more detail , but for common weapons this doesn't work.