08-13-2012, 01:42 AM
I'm going to be honest here: I don't think you should be asking us for help on this project. This site is decidedly not noob friendly, and as someone who is "not too bothered about amazing quality," you really aren't going to get the help you want. I mean, this site is great if you're dedicated to the craft, and you want to be a godly spriter or whatever, but if you're just a casual onlooker, you're going to get your shit rocked.
To put this into perspective, imagine you're trying to make your friend a painting. You just asked a whole bunch of professional artists to assist in the creation of a bad crayon drawing.
You want to make the sprites out of edits, because you aren't experienced enough to make custom ones; this is frowned upon because this is a semi-professional site. Unless you want to pick up an entire craft in the time between now and your friend's birthday, be my guest, but since I doubt you really care if your birthday card is a masterwork, I would recommend you go through here, see which games you recognize, and take sprites from those (you know, Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc).
Also, don't save as .jpg. Or, if you didn't save as .jpg, don't use photobucket, because that sometimes converts your image to a .jpg. Save as .png. .jpg will ruin your image.
To put this into perspective, imagine you're trying to make your friend a painting. You just asked a whole bunch of professional artists to assist in the creation of a bad crayon drawing.
You want to make the sprites out of edits, because you aren't experienced enough to make custom ones; this is frowned upon because this is a semi-professional site. Unless you want to pick up an entire craft in the time between now and your friend's birthday, be my guest, but since I doubt you really care if your birthday card is a masterwork, I would recommend you go through here, see which games you recognize, and take sprites from those (you know, Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc).
Also, don't save as .jpg. Or, if you didn't save as .jpg, don't use photobucket, because that sometimes converts your image to a .jpg. Save as .png. .jpg will ruin your image.