Guide: Sprite-Making (The "Frankentracing" Method)

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Glen Elg
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Guide: Sprite-Making (The "Frankentracing" Method)

Post by Glen Elg »

Hey, it's your buddy Glen here with some great tips on how to make better frankensprited sprites, and I figure I'd show my method of frankenspriting, which I like to call "frankentracing" (because "frankentracenspriting" is kind of ridiculous). This will be overall an art tutorial, but I really do want the frankentracing method to be a highlight of this, because I think it'll help make it less obvious when your sprites are frankensprited.

I'll be using Paint.NET, but this applies to any program. I suggest Paint.NET, even if you have Photoshop or other programs, because the toolset makes spriting easier (because Photoshop, after all, is mainly a photo editing program). The sprite that I'll be walking you through is my most recent sprite; it's in the spoiler tag below, in case you're the kind of person who wants to see the process before seeing the finished sprite.
Spoiler : Final Sprite :
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And lastly, before we start the tutorial, I want to point out that this is just one way of spriting, and just one way of frankenspriting. There are other great methods of making sprites; VirtAnderson has a method for spriting (without frankenspriting) that's completely different from this method, but his sprites still come out looking great. So after you look at this guide, check out other people's spriting guides and see what makes the best looking sprites. And remember: just because one method of spriting might be faster, it isn't necessarily a better method; often, the methods that take more time to learn create better sprites.

That being said, let's begin!

PART 1: Prep Stuff
Spoiler : Part 1 :
Before we get into the spriting, I want to establish (at least for Paint.NET users) what settings should be used when spriting. If you aren't using Paint.NET, figure out what settings will do the same things as these in your art program.

ImageImage

These settings are probably the most important; they'll show up when you use whatever tools they apply to, and when you change these settings on one tool, the changes usually carry over to the other tools that use these settings.

First is Anti-aliasing, the most important of these. You want this set to Disabled. Anti-aliasing is when the edge of an image or the line between two areas of color are blurred. There aren't any sprites with anti-aliased edges in the actual games; they're completely visible (there's one exception, named in the next paragraph, but it's a weird exception). Keeping Anti-aliasing set to Disabled also allows you to use the Brush tool without causing those transparency or coloring issues.

There's one character in the whole series with partial transparency (Dahlia Hawthorne, if you're curious), but even that partial transparency is for one object with hard edges (it's a see-through shawl); it's not even anti-aliasing, so there isn't a reason to use it in your sprites.

Second is Selection Clipping Mode; this should be set to Pixelated Selection Quality. This setting will keep the edges of any selections from creating antialiasing. Not much else with this setting.

Last is Tolerance; this setting applies to the Fill Bucket and Magic Wand Select tools. It should be set to 0%. When you select or fill based on color, higher tolerance will select a wider range of colors; this is bad in spriting, because you'll often mess with colors you don't want to if this is set to a high setting. 0% tolerance keeps the tool to working with the precise color you choose.

There are other settings that aren't necessary, but can help, and I'll discuss them once they're relevant.

Lastly, the size of all Ace Attorney sprites is 256x192; this is absolutely necessary for sprites in the AAO editor.
PART 2: Color Limits
Spoiler : Part 2 :
While optional, I highly recommend giving yourself a limit on the number of colors you're allowed to use in your sprite, for two reasons:
  1. Ace Attorney sprites have color limits, so it's more accurate to the series to have a color limit.
  2. It forces you to work with less colors; this makes you stretch your range of colors and use the colors you do have in a creative way, improving your spriting skills.
This guide will include lots of tips for working within color limits, including tips for when your colors start to run out.

For reference, sprites for AA1-AA3 (with the exception of Rise from the Ashes) have a 16-color limit, and AA4 sprites (as well as sprites from Rise from the Ashes) have a 32-color limit. For clarity, these numbers don't include transparency; if you count transparency, it's 17 or 33 colors. I'll be working within the 16-color limit; I prefer it because it really restricts me and forces me to be more creative with my colors.
PART 3: Getting Started/Tracing Stuff
Spoiler : Part 3 :
Now that all the preliminaries are over with, let's get started! This is a drawing of the character I'll be spriting:

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It's a good idea to have a drawing of your character; I use it to trace over, but even if you don't use it for tracing, it's good to know what parts of other sprites you might need for frankensprites, so that you don't have to make all of the parts of your character up on the fly.

I shrunk the picture so that the part I needed fit into the 256x192 canvas. You can't see it in the picture of the canvas below, but I used a Lotta Hart sprite to make sure the proportions of the sprite were right. (For an example of sprite proportions not working right, check out my asset thread and look at my first two sprites; they're only profiles, but you can obviously see that the heads are totally different sizes. Learn from my mistakes.)

Whenever you're shrinking or stretching selections, this next setting is one you'll want to consider:
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This setting determines whether or not the program will blur stuff when you select it and shrink/stretch it. Bilinear will blur the selection, and Nearest Neighbor will not blur it. Depending on what you're doing, either option can be useful. If you're ever stretching the sprite you're working on, though, make sure you use Nearest Neighbor; you'll have coloring/transparency issues otherwise.

Here's my drawing shrunk onto the canvas:

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Now normally, I'd find a face with a shape that matches this one to frankensprite with, but I didn't do it here because there aren't any canon characters with this face shape, especially for the women (AA really needs more diversity in face shapes and body types, man). But the bright side is that I get to lead into the frankentracing method, starting with the tracing part.

I start out with my skin tone palette; the lowest number of colors that makes a good skin tone palette is 4, and if you want to include highlights, it's 5. Here are the 4 main tones for my skin tone palette; I do mess with this a little later, and I eventually add a 5th highlight tone, but this was the base I started with:

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Now here's how I trace: I set the thing I'm tracing to a lower opacity on its own layer under the main layer, and then in my coloring layer, I start placing colors from the palette I'm already using over the tracing source, that way I don't have to create new colors unless I absolutely need to. Here's a picture to illustrate:

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What I want to stress about this (and what I'll stress again later) is that you won't be using the colors from the thing you're tracing; you'll be using your existing palette. More on why this is important later.

At this point, I'll fill in the base skin tone in this area and zoom out to 100% size to make sure the curve looks natural, and that it doesn't look zigzaggy or squiggly (there are professional terms for these, but I like "zigzaggy" and "squiggly"):

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It's a little bit weird because the line thickness isn't too consistent, and there's a dark pixel in there that messes with the flow of the line, so I'll fix those and continue to work on this area:

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That looks better.

In my personal method of spriting, I tend to skip around a bunch from one area to another, going back to areas that still need work later on, so we'll finish the face later.
PART 4: Frankentracing!
Spoiler : Part 4 :
This is my personal favorite part of this tutorial; I'll give a little background as to how this frankenspriting method started.

Before I started frankenspriting, I still liked sticking to a 16-color limit, because I like spriting as if my sprites could be used in an actual Ace Attorney game. The thing with sticking to a color limit is that frankenspriting often messes that up; you end up putting Max Galactica's nose on Zak Gramarye's face or something, and then your color palette starts growing ridiculously quickly. That's why I came up with frankentracing.

Frankentracing is when you use parts of other character sprites in your own sprite, but instead of directly making it a part of your sprite, you paste it into a layer below it and trace over it in your main layer. Here are the benefits to this method:
  • It keeps color limits down!
  • It makes it less obvious that you're frankenspriting!
  • You don't have to go through the hassle of deleting parts of sprites you don't need (most of the time)!
  • You can change any parts of the sprite you don't like more effectively!
  • You can use facial features from two characters with really different skin tones in the same sprite!
We're gonna frankentrace Desiree Delite's nose into this sprite. Let's get her sprite, and paste it in on a separate layer:

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And then we'll cut out just her nose. You don't really have to cut stuff out, but since this layer's gonna be slightly transparent later, keeping the whole thing really obscures the whole face of my base drawing.

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As you can see, the nose is much lighter-skinned than my sprite is going to be. So now we'll lower the transparency on the Desiree layer, and we'll start tracing over it with the palette we already have in our main layer:

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We'll finish tracing it, fill in some of the skin color around the nose, and then zoom out to 100% to see how it looks:

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It looks really jagged, right? Well, that's not an issue; we can go back in and modify the colors so it looks smoother. Not only does frankentracing let you stick with color limits, it also lands you in situations where you have to change the frankensprited part so much that it stops looking frankensprited, and it looks more like its own sprite. Here's the fix to the nose:

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And that's frankenspriting. I'll be doing a lot more for the rest of this sprite, and I'll go over more specific methods next.
PART 5: Doing Eyes/Stretching and Rotating Source Sprites
Spoiler : Part 5 :
Next is the eyes; this section is important for a few reasons, but the main reason is that one of the bigger problems with frankenspriting is that it's really easy to tell where some parts of the sprite are from. The two biggest giveaways, from what I've noticed, at least, are the hair and the eyes. For example, it's easy to tell when someone uses Apollo Justice's eyes or Edgeworth's hair (those two specifically are things I recommend against using in frankensprites, but that's my personal opinion). I'm not too good with hair, but as far as eyes go, I find that frankentracing forces more original eyes than frankenspriting does, reason being that, as I said in the last section, it just lands you in situations where you have to improvise and add your own features.

For this sprite, I decided to take AA1 Ema Skye's eyes and use them for this sprite. But look at what happens when I copypaste the eye into the picture:

Image

See how ridiculously huge my drawing's eyes are? This is mainly due to the fact that I tend to draw eyes larger than those in Ace Attorney sprites, but we can still use Ema's eye for this sprite while keeping the size I drew in the picture, with the help of frankentracing!

So check this out: another great thing about frankentracing is that since you're basically drawing everything yourself and only using other sprites as tracing sources, you can resize any source material and fix it in the tracing process. So that's what I'll do here. When I stretch canon sprites for frankentracing purposes, I usually have the selection quality setting set to Nearest Neighbor; you can really do it either way, but I usually use Bilinear when I'm messing with drawings and other non-sprites. Here's Ema's eye stretched to the size of the eye of the base drawing:

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Next, I lower the transparency of the Ema eye layer and start frankentracing on the main layer. I use the other eye of the base drawing as reference and start messing with the sprited eye to get it looking less like Ema's eye and more like this character's eye.

Now, you may have noticed that when I did the mouth, I added another color to my palette; it's a reddish-orange lipstick color; the great thing about adding more colors is that you can be creative with those colors instead of just adding more when you think you might need them. I know that later on, I'm going to be using blues and whites for her hat and clothes, and I have this red color from the lips, so I use a really light blue, a white, and a red in this eye, in addition to my existing skin tones:

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At this point, it's really hard to tell that this is even based on Ema's eye, right?

So now we'll move on to the other eye. We could use another eye ref, or even the same eye ref, but we're gonna flip this eye to get the other one.

Here's the issue with flipping one eye to get the other: symmetry is often really noticeable, and it can often look really awkward, especially if you use it on things like clothes, where clothing folds are pretty random and asymmetrical. So what we're going to do in this case is flip the eye, and then rotate it ever so slightly, making sure to set the selection quality to Nearest Neighbor so that we're still only using colors that are already in our palette. Doing this makes it so that it's not completely symmetrical, but it's still not obviously the same eye, and it looks less awkward. The selection in this picture is actually a rectangle that's been rotated slightly to make the new eye:

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You'll usually have to fix some awkward-looking parts of the new part manually by zooming out to 100% and then going back and fixing them, which I did here. This is the resulting set of eyes (I also added some hair, which we'll get to in the next section):

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PART 6: Error-Fixing
Spoiler : Part 6 :
Here's the sprite as it is at this point in the process (it's the same as the last picture in the previous section):

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As I mentioned at the end of the last section, I added some hair here. It may be a bit difficult to notice, but one of the shades that I added to do the hair doesn't look right. See if you can notice what's weird about it:

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That lighter hair tone has a really weird angle in the left-side line:

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The short line on the upper end is fine, because the shadow from the baseball cap is causing that shadow. But this weird section needs to be changed. So we'll just change it. Some sprite errors like this will look fine when you're really zoomed in and working on the sprite, but when you zoom out to 100%, you'll realize that something looks really funky. This section is about finding errors, so I'd like to stress here the importance of zooming out to 100% as much as you can; the more often you do it, the easier it'll be to catch these errors.

The fix is done in this next picture, but I want you to look at this and see if you notice anything odd. There's not a specific answer here, just look and see if you can find parts of the picture that look off to you. I'm talking larger stuff, like weird proportions or body part placement.

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If it seemed hard to find errors (and even if it didn't), have a look at this next trick. All you have to do is flip the image horizontally, and errors will start magically appearing, and you can fix them that way. Here's the same picture, just flipped on the horizontal; see if anything looks out of place now.

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There are quite a few errors, and it was probably easier to notice them this time around. Here are the ones I saw; there might even be some still in the final picture that I never caught:

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Check that out. These errors might have been more apparent to you than they were to me, but it's harder to notice your own errors since you yourself are slowly going through the process. So flip your canvas every once in a while and fix your errors; it'll come out a lot nicer.

Here's the sprite thus far, with the discovered errors having been fixed:

Image
PART 7: An Attempt at a Hair Tutorial
Spoiler : Part 7 :
Before you read the rest of this section, I'd really like to stress this: hair is one of the things I'm the worst with in spriting, so there are probably flaws with this method of spriting hair. If you see any other tutorial that completely contradicts the advice on drawing or spriting hair that I give here, it's very likely that the other tutorial is better than this one. It's also possible that it's a stylistic difference, but my point here is to take what I say in this section very lightly.

That being said, here's what I did to get this character's hair. I traced the base drawing to get the outline, filled the outline with the hair color (notice that none of these colors are a pure black; I've never noticed any Ace Attorney sprite that includes pure black as a color), and used the outline color to add some lines. Ace Attorney hair tends to look really simple, and is often blocky (more so in the later games than the earlier ones). Of course, this varies; I'd say the range of detail in hair goes from Detective Gumshoe to Vera Misham. The area in that range most sprites fit is probably around Ron DeLite; really blocky as whole, but you can still see some detail. So that's how I placed the lines.

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Notice that I only used two colors here; I'm really trying to compress my colors, and while I'll be adding a midtone to make it look better, the final hair ends up being only three colors. There's no highlight, however; highlights are used sometimes in AA sprites, but they show up less in the AA art style than in other art styles. Just don't get too complex with the hair. Here's the midtone, added to the ends of the straight lines to simulate anti-aliasing:

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I'll be adding shading in a later step to stress the blockiness of the hair.
PART 8: Frankentracing Tips
Spoiler : Part 8 :
Here are some more aspects of frankentracing I want to highlight; first is partial frankentracing. This is when you use a reference sprite, but barely. I want to give her a collar for her polo, but there aren't a whole lot of sprites with open collars. So what I settle for is using part of Spark Brushel's collar; let's see if it's the same size as the collar I want to sprite.

ImageImage

Nope; the collar isn't nearly long enough; plus, the base drawing has a buttoned collar. But the part that goes around the neck is really close, and the thickness is pretty spot-on. So what I'll do is frankentrace the parts that I like about Brushel's collar, and I'll scratch the rest of it.

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Next up, I want to sprite her body. The thing with body poses is that they tend to be dead giveaways as to who was used for a frankensprite. This is where partial frankentracing comes in real handy. Let's get the shoulders from AA4 Phoenix Wright:

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Let me show you the sprite behind the main layer, just so you can see how convoluted this really is.

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This sprite has been flipped, shrunken, split in half, and rearranged. This isn't stuff that can easily be done with normal frankenspriting methods. But with frankentracing, you'll be tracing over everything with your own palette, so as long as the parts you need (in this case, just the shoulders) are in a good spot and can be traced well, you're good to go. Given the rest of this process, it'll be a while until I actually sprite the shoulders, but pay attention to when I finally put them in; it's just the shoulders, and not the whole body.
PART 9: Making Room for More Colors
Spoiler : Part 9 :
With this sprite, I want to make the non-collar portion of the polo white, but I already have 16 colors, and all I have to color the white section with is a shade of white, a really light gray, and dark blacks that are going to contrast way too much with this white. Outlines on white sections of sprites are still dark grays, so I can't just use my light gray as an outline; I need a new color. So here's what I do:

Take a look at your palette. Here's mine (I colored the background green to make the white on my palette more visible, and the background will be green for most of the guide from here on out):

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Look around and find the two colors that are the most similar to each other. For this palette, it seems that the closest colors are gonna be #1 and #13. So what I'm gonna do is fill all of the #1 pixels in the sprite with #13, or vice versa. To do this without hassle, look for this setting in the Fill Bucket tool:

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If this is set to Contiguous, the tool will only fill the area you click on. If it's set to Global, it will fill everywhere that color appears, whether it's connected to the spot you click on or not. Be careful to check what this is set to every time you use the Fill Bucket (or the Magic Wand Select tool, since this setting is for that tool as well), that way you don't accidentally fill something you don't mean to. Even if you do, though, you have the undo button for that.

So here's the sprite at this point in time with #1 and #13 made into one color:

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It still looks fine, which means we've kept the quality while taking a color out of the palette. At this point, I noticed that there's a little bit of weird stuff in the hair on the top (because the color we've gotten rid of was from the highlight we fixed in Part 6), so we'll fix that, and add some lines for more blockiness:

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And now we have room for one more color in our palette, which we'll be using to add a good outline color for the rest of the polo shirt.
PART 10: Putting It All Together
Spoiler : Part 10 :
Now we do the rest of the sprite; there's no specific focus for this section, so it'll just be using a lot of the stuff we've done so far to finish this up.

First, we'll take another error check by flipping the sprite horizontally. It turns out there's an error, and it's actually one I didn't notice during the first error check:

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So we'll move the hat closer to the center of her head (toward the side with the ponytail), and add in those shoulders we planned out in Part 8.

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With the shoulders done, we'll do a partial frankentrace of Franziska von Karma's chest. Notice how I'm really only outlining it and using the shadows; it'd be complicated and unnecessary to go more into detail with this, so we're keeping it simple.

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(The shadows under her chest aren't exactly accurate, since the light source in this sprite is on the right, and it'd be hitting some of the areas that are in shadow now. It'll be fixed once we get the rest of the body in.)

I couldn't find a good lower torso to frankentrace, so I just scratched the rest of the main body. For the arms, I went to Maggey Byrde. Now, Maggey's smaller than this character, so I sized up and rotated her arm (using the Bilinear setting this time, even though I usually use Nearest Neighbor for sprite traces most of the time). Here's Maggey's arm as it appears in her own sprite, next to how it looks after all of the stretching and rotating:

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Now I frankentrace her arm, get another Maggey arm and frankentrace that one, fix the shading issue on the chest, and look around for any small fixes. Use the flip test once you think you're done to see if there are any huge errors you've missed.


And here's the finished sprite:

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There might be errors you see in this sprite that I still haven't noticed yet; it's always a good idea to show your sprites to someone else and get their honest opinion about any mistakes, that way you can make your sprites better. And there's nothing wrong with a few small errors (look at sprites from AA1 and see how many errors you can spot in those official sprites); just make sure they don't distract from the overall sprite. The goal is to keep improving your skills. It comes down to repeating the process over and over again, questioning yourself every so often, asking, "are there any issues with this sprite so far?", and not being hard on yourself if it gets really difficult. Pay attention to your improvement, and keep on trying to get better.
If you have anything you want made clearer, or any suggestions, go ahead and reply! I'd be happy to clear anything up and make it easier for others to make better frankensprites! Have a great day, everyone! :mrgreen:
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SuperAj3
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Re: Guide: Sprite-Making (The "Frankentracing" Method)

Post by SuperAj3 »

Nice tutorial!
This is sorta how I do my sprites (at least for the body), although yours looks more finer than what I do XD
(I make weird cut and paste jobs and trace over it)
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Re: Guide: Sprite-Making (The "Frankentracing" Method)

Post by mercurialSK »

Neat tutorial XD Nice stuff.

Looking at the result, some suggestions:

1. Since it's literally working with floating pieces add maybe basic proportions to keep in mind, the major ones I think are that the distance between eyes should be one eye, elbows should be on the same level, and elbow joints are at the bottom of the ribcage (picture of a skeleton goes here)
2. Check for things that are too twisted (Franziska's shoulder might have been a bit better to make that arm look slightly more natural, it's hard to frankenstuff between front and side sprites though..)
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Glen Elg
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Re: Guide: Sprite-Making (The "Frankentracing" Method)

Post by Glen Elg »

mercurialSK wrote:Neat tutorial XD Nice stuff.

Looking at the result, some suggestions:

1. Since it's literally working with floating pieces add maybe basic proportions to keep in mind, the major ones I think are that the distance between eyes should be one eye, elbows should be on the same level, and elbow joints are at the bottom of the ribcage (picture of a skeleton goes here)
2. Check for things that are too twisted (Franziska's shoulder might have been a bit better to make that arm look slightly more natural, it's hard to frankenstuff between front and side sprites though..)
Thanks for the suggestions; I'm still editing sprites for this character, so I'll keep these in mind! I did notice the uneven elbows, but it looks like I'll still have to lower them.

On an unrelated note: in a hilarious turn of events, I found out that I never used the color I added in Part 9, so this is actually a 15-color sprite. In addition to fixing anatomical issues, I'll be making the Sprite look smoother with the extra color. I should be posting the changes to my asset thread.
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