How do you make custom sprites?

[DetectiveChrom]

Do any of you guys have a good recommendation for making custom sprites? Im trying to make something based off of something personal and I can't use canon sprites for it.

[Calvinball]

There are a number of spriting guides in the Art Guides thread here in the Your Art forum.

[SuperAj3]

Do any of you guys have a good recommendation for making custom sprites? Im trying to make something based off of something personal and I can't use canon sprites for it.

I use a canon character as a base for my OC's silhouettes and then once I've got a rough outline, I outline all the details in black (drawing this all at 4 times the sprite's intended size), then do base colouring and then add shading.

If you're using a program with layers, try to keep each colour on a separate layer, so it's easier to then do the shading afterwards. When you're done, shrink the image and if you can, 'decrease colour depth' to make it look like it was pixelated and it helps remove some minor errors in the drawing.

If you've got just a mouse/trackpad and a free program, you can follow the same steps, just outlining in black with the pencil tool at normal size, using the fill bucket to do base colouring, then add shading and lastly touch up the outlines (They should be a darker colour than the colour they outline, but don't leave them black!).

[Moonlit Painting]

I'm kind of new to AAO and PWAA in general, I want to make a trial, but I've noticed my dialogue for most characters is stale, including Phoenix himself. I think it's mostly since I've only completed the first game and I don't know the characters as well as many other fans.

So to solve the problem, I thought to make my own characters and write their own stories and personalities, that way they can't be considered out-of-character. Then I realized, there was probably no easy way to make a PWAA Sprite or download one for that matter. So I decided to ask you guys to see how you make/get your custom sprites.

Thank you for taking time to read this!

[Reverie]

Many people use custom sprites that other people have made. Check out the Random Characters thread in the Your Art section for those. You could also try the Request Topic, if you want something specific, but it's not often that full, custom sprite requests are fulfilled over there.
If you want to try to make your own sprites instead, there are a number of tutorials you can use in the Art Guides section to get started.

[Thatonejimmy]

I'm kind of new to AAO and PWAA in general, I want to make a trial, but I've noticed my dialogue for most characters is stale, including Phoenix himself. I think it's mostly since I've only completed the first game and I don't know the characters as well as many other fans.

So to solve the problem, I thought to make my own characters and write their own stories and personalities, that way they can't be considered out-of-character. Then I realized, there was probably no easy way to make a PWAA Sprite or download one for that matter. So I decided to ask you guys to see how you make/get your custom sprites.

Thank you for taking time to read this!

Well, there are sprite sheets and the like on http://court-records.net/, and If you need a good sprite editing program, you could download paint.net, which you could download here: http://www.getpaint.net/index.html, and you could also get gimp for animating your sprites here: http://www.gimp.org/. I hope this helped you out.