Art program to create custom sprites?

[Dear President Seinfeld]

For the most part MS Paint is sufficient, since it lets you edit pixels. I heard people talking about how XP's version is the best one, if you have another version of Windows you can probably download it somewhere.

Some people also use GraphicsGale, never used it myself but apparently it's great for spriting.

GIMP and Photoshop are pretty much the same, to be honest I would only buy Photoshop if there were some specific features that I wanted to use. But most of the time, in terms of layers and all that GIMP should be sufficient. So yeah, if you want to work in layers or be able to move stuff around easily GIMP is good (it's particularly handy when making sprite sheets).

And then there's also Paint.NET, as mentioned above. Contrary to unpopular belief, it's just as fitting for non-losers as it is for losers. Seriously though, lots of people here use it too. Not sure how it is for spriting specifically, but I think for the most part it comes into the same category as GIMP and PS (although I think it's more directed at image creation, whereas the others are focused more on image manipulation).

All that said, I use GIMP for all my image work, but I'm not a spriter. If you're not looking to make anything too complex, as you said, you can probably work well enough with any of these.

As for tips, I'll leave that to the experts

Photoshop has actually moved a lot closer to supporting original art in recent years, and it pretty much the only application you can use to create really, really good original art without using physical mediums.

Regular art made in Photoshop:


But, in the interest of fairness, this pixel art was made in MS Paint: