I prefer Paint.net, but Gimp is perfectly viable. Best way (or how I learned) is to take a look at how the sprites are put together. Cut a piece of a sprite - like the barrel of the Supershotgun for instance, and zoom in close. You'll see a lot of big, bold color, that blurs into darker or lighter colors as it approaches light and dark. Working with low-res sprites, you can't really have 'detail' as such - it's too small for stark contrast and black lines to be effective. You have to try and simulate the detail. Try using the paint brush with a small brush size and very light hardness. Go over each band of light and dark, in differing layers. Zoom out and in to see how it looks from a distance - even vanilla sprites look very complex from a distance, even when they look a mess of pixels up close.SharkLordSatan wrote:Question; how do you guys make your gun sprites so detailed and smooth-looking? I've been wanting to re-create some Halo weapons from the first-person perspective but haven't figured out how (nor have I found any good references to go off of :L)
I generally use MSPaint, Gimp 2 and FireAlpaca btw.
And watch some videos. There is a really groovy one for spriting here, that was mentioned previously. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0I7QkC3S9A
