Id try and sprite them myself, but the problems are I can forsee people will complain about the Extremely poor sprites, which itself is Demoralising. Another problem is when I look at other peoples sprites to try and learn how to sprite, I dont know where to start and feel...Terrible for not being able to effectively sprite.

don't just sprite over vanilla stuff

Now, I'm no expert, but I have a few reccomendations. First off, get GraphicsGale, it's a very good program for spriting. I also reccomend you draw out sketches of what you want things to look like, and refer to them often. Finally, don't do reprites, I just put a normal sprite from, say, a browncoat arm next to my work area, and use it to scale and such, but don't just sprite over vanilla stuff. I think these things are helpful, but once again, I'm no expert.

MSPaint is perfectly fine, I use it personally, but GraphicsGale is a pretty good program. It is best to sketch out your sprites before you make them.

Resprites make things easy. As long as you make it so that it doesn't resemble the original, then you're good. (I always use vanilla sprites as bases.)
But don't just put a few pixels here and there, or recolor it.

EDIT: You see the link to 'Pixelation' in my signature? Click it, there are some good pixel artist there for you to study.

Excellent points, supergoat.

Another useful point to be made about bitmap INGAME graphics is that they hardly ever miss an apportunity to pronounce dents and general volumetric shifts on objects, with contrasting highlights. For the longest time when I was starting out with pixel art, since I came from a comic art background where we usually shade from pure white light ( white paper ) to pure dark ( full ink ) I was having trouble convincingly suggesting volumes in pixel art. I did everything right, in theory. The stuff I drew were lightsourced, the colours were ok, the shapes registered well in general. After going back to studying Speedball II and Cadaver and the like, I realized what I was doing wrong, or rather, not doing much of: I was working from a middle shade, towards darkness, and that was it. If there were brighter spots, they were on large areas, where a lot of direct light would hit. I practically had no idea of the power of highlight, especially of the sharp type. A sharp highlight is that which might go two or even more steps up from the body of colour it's highlighting, on colour ramp, and which usually is extra accented by darker pixels than the body of colour around it too.

Let's say I was trying to draw some cracks on a dented metal wall, right? (zoom in on these)



This would be the old helm. Technically, this is not wrong. There's variations of lightness, there's the information that cracks are there, but it looks dull and lifeless. Studying bitmap brothers I understood that anywhere where's an edge, there's highlight! Obivously this has a lot to do with what type of material you're trying to shade, but in pixel art, especially game art, clarity is important, so this effect should be overstressed a bit.




Likeso. For every contour, an edge highlight. But this isn't all I learnt by the bitmap brothers. I also learnt the importance of pushing the contrast far more than you would in other media, to travel the complete range from pure black to pure white. Now, they don't do this as much as I do (my usage has evolved for other reasons to be even more harsh) but the theory's there, and it's more to do with the needs of game art than it's to do with realistic representation of reality. Again, this is about clarity and how fast the eye can proccess information and detail. Where there's EDGE, which in gameplay can possibly mean unreachable area and the like, you need to give the brain the tools to work out what it's looking at fast. So more sharpening and contrast is good.

Another thing that the brothers taught me was the importance of the traditional 75%, 50% and 25% ordered dithers as means to suggest texture and inter-shade buffering. Now my examples use 16 shades of gray which is insanely rich for this sort of stuff, but if I were to use say, 5 shades between black and white, by doing bodies of ordered dither, I would be able to fake and convey both rougher terrain, and more importantly, an extra 5 lightness levels between my original 6, and if I used 25% and 75% patterns, 24 different lightness levels between pure black and pure white, using only 5 colour slots. This is a great strength to have, and the brothers put it to use constantly.