Making sprites for a birthday card, need help

[BadDemoman]

So my friends birthday is coming up, and I'm making her a birthday card. I decided to make a whole bunch of sprites of characters from video games, anime etc. she likes. I'm not too bother about amazing quality, as I'm not very good at spriting. For the front of it, I made a pixel art of Deadpool from the recent trailer for the deadpool game, which came out terribly, but I don't really care XD. So far in regards to sprites, I have also made a deadpool sprite by adapting a Megaman sprite. I was wondering which other sprites would be easiest to adapt into particular characters? I'm not quite good enough to make sprites from scratch, and part of the humour is that she will hopefully recognize where I've adapted the sprites from. So the characters I still need to make are:
Italy(Hetalia)
Germany(Hetalia)
Japan(Hetalia)
Loki(Avengers)
Can't really think of any others...might add some later. Looking for 8-bit sprites, but if there isn't any appropriate ones, I would be willing to move up to 16-bit.
Thanks in advance!

[Marth]

Make them from scratch. It builds skill, and if it's a present the quality shouldn't matter but the thought. Don't edit Megaman characters, it's overdone and you'll just end up making something tacky. I know this isn't what you wanted to hear but it's what you should do. Everyone has to start somewhere so now is better than later, and on a final note please don't start with 8-bit. Everyone thinks 8-bit is something incredibly easy but in reality due to the restrictions it's actually quite hard and even harder to convert complex characters into. Better yet don't even think about "bits" just work on getting a handle on the basics before you even try to fit a particular style or set of restrictions.

[Gaia]

Seems like it's a mostly hetalia-heavy cast, Loki would outright stand out, you should swap him out with America at least, and it would be nice if we can SEE a rough draft beforehand.

Though what I know of is that since you mentioned "adapting a Mega Man look", you must be a first-timer yes? I would suggest instead of using a mega man style, you can make one yourself based on those traits. (the usual black outline, the boxing stance, etc, hold the air-hump though)

[BadDemoman]

Thanks to both of you. Yes, I am a first timer. As for Loki standing out, like I said, I've got more characters to add. Just can't think of some for now. I'll try making them from scratch and see how it goes. I've got plenty of time, so a couple of failures along the way shouldn't matter too much XD. Apologies for not posting my work-in-progress beforehand, I'm kinda new to this site, so I wasn't sure how to post a picture.



Like I said, not exactly amazing >_<

[Thumbtacks]

By saving it as .Jpeg, you've effectively made it unusable. Use PNG instead

Also, don't edit Megaman. That can't be stressed enough.

[Cobalt Blue]

might as well slap some dog poo on that birthday card and call it humor.

or at least, try to make a parody out of terrible sprite edits in some other artform, so it wouldn't look as if you didn't even tried to make something worth a shit.

[Keiang]

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.

[UnHolyDarkth]

Well for a beginner, thats not bad at all. Although, in terms of spriting: That is called a recolor.. So on Spriters Resource.. It literally means nothing to the community. Hope you don't take it harsh there.

Had you've done something custom with that Deadpool sprite of yours, It would've had gotten constructive criticism or appraise. However, you saved it as JPEG.

JPEG/JPG ruins the quality of sprites. You must always save it on PNG.

Also, we have a spriting dictonary. I recommend you use this as it will come in very handy

http://spriters-resource.com/community/s...?tid=13868

Try to get into custom spriting fellow member. It'll make things better and your friend will love the birthday card alot