*newb alert* Sprite Animation

[StarSock64]

In case it's still not clear enough I'll try it again:

You don't know how to sprite. You did not "learn how to make a standing sprite." You're not ready to make a game with custom sprites. Your sprite is not good, and you are not ready for animation. You need to learn the basics. This requires reading and dedication. You cannot learn this in a day or two either.

There are tutorials in the spriting and pixel art section and the creativity section.

If you're going to try to make something for a game, I can't really help you because you're not ready yet and you can't expect to be any time soon. If you still want to learn how to sprite and not do these other things, I suggest trying to make a sprite with more realistic proportions. It's a common misconception to newcomers that they can do small things with basic shapes, but that's no way to learn and despite what they may think they can't even do it properly. To learn art you have to do things that you might not like to do. You have to -read- about the human body, even though at times it can be boring, because it's not something you can automatically know or even learn easily from practice or observation. Even when it comes to simple characters, by learning more complicated anatomy you learn a lot of important principles along the way that are helpful for just about everything.

So, if you just want this to be a quick process or something for fun, this really isn't the forum for you. If you're more serious about it and want to give it a try, you should try to make a more proportional sprite. You probably want specific links, but tbh I'm not even sure which would be best for a beginner since I first started learning from a book. I'd just suggest going to the art resources thread. I know somebody (I think metaru?) linked to this before, which is pretty helpful even though the drawings on it suck. However, those are more for drawing. The information is valuable but the 8-heads thing doesn't work as well on sprites. The spriting dictionary will give you all sorts of tips on techniques and is practically an essential read, and maybe it'll give you a better idea of what kind of proportions work on a sprite, or else you can try to look at some other ones. The concept of contrast is something to look at especially. I can say that figure drawing is really helpful for spriting even though it seems to sometimes be more associated with drawing.

Jeez okay that's enough out of me, that was a lot of work. By the way if you had trouble reading the entirety of my post, reading about art's even worse...!

edit: AHAHA look at all the posts that came while I was typing this