HD Pokemon Sprite Project!

[Pokemon Trainer Sarah]

Absol looks great! :D

[SassySnivy]

Thank you! Herdier, Stoutland will be next.

[SassySnivy]

More stuff, guys! Have these three elemental monkeys.

And since I'm doing this project for Relic Castle, too, here's a Victini back sprite.

They're wanting to create these and try to implement them into higher-resolution Pokemon fan games.

[The Being]

Gosh Speed, these are wonderful! Great work. :D

[Pokemon Trainer Sarah]

Ooh I really love those backsprites! Blurry backsprites pretty much ruined the excitement of animated BW battles for me. xD

[SassySnivy]

Thanks, you guys! I'm going to go ahead and post these here just for fun. :>








I actually started this project here in this other forum if anyone that's still interested in making a contribution wants to see what's been done so far. ^^

[SassySnivy]

Editing this post to insert a tutorial to link to from another forum.

So I'm finally getting around to creating a comprehensive tutorial for this! Huzzah! I don't feel like coming up with any long-winded introductions. Let's just start.

Find the sprite you want to use and enlarge it to 200%, as shown below. I just use Paint for resizing. You can use whatever program you'd like.


The end result will look like this:


For this next step, you'll need a program that supports layers and opacity / alpha. For starters, try Paint.NET. For the sake of simplicity I am not going to explain how to use the program: there are plenty of comprehensive guides on the web about how to use certain features of certain software if you just take time to do a quick Google search.

Paste the enlarged version of the sprite (in this tutorial, we'll refer to Grovyle) as a new image. Make a layer above the pasted image; this will be the tracing layer.₁ Make sure to make the top layer transparent.₂


Turn down the opacity / alpha of the bottom layer to oh, say 50% or 30%. You want to be able to see what you're doing, but at the same time you want to be able to see the original image.


Additionally, I like to use a color that really contrasts with the original sprite so that it's easier to work with. Just a minor convenience.
It might not be a bad idea, also, to make another layer (filled in with your background color) below the pasted image. This way you don't have to worry about the background color being inconsistent when you change the alpha (opacity) of the sprite.

---

PART II: Line Art

Nice! Now that we've got the technical **** out of the way, we can actually talk about the process.

Go back to your top layer and start tracing. Don't worry about pixel-perfection right now. Just make it so that you can distinguish what the **** is even going on. x]

Use both your original, unscaled sprite and a picture of the Pokemon's official artwork as a reference as you go along. It really, really helps. Trust me. I like to use both Sugi's official art and his dream world art. And maybe some other things I can get my hands on.



I'm going to stop here a moment to show you something very important. Do you see, how in the original sprite, Grovyle doesn't have as much arm definition as it does in its art? See below:


In its original art, its shoulders are more protrusive.


I didn't fully follow the original sprite here for a good reason. Sprites (at least, Pokemon ones) are small, and you can't fit as much definition in them as you could if they were larger. If you were to try to fit all of the subtle details in the sprite, you would probably lower the readability; meaning that it would be harder to tell what exactly is going on. And hell, it might even not look very good. This occurs less in Grovyle, but occurs significantly in some other Pokemon:









I think you get the picture.

So it's important to keep that stuff in mind. Of course, you can always go back over it later and make corrections after.



I know I told you not to worry about pixels right now--which is exactly what I ended up doing anyway--but for me that's just a compulsive habit. Whatever works for you, really. Anyway, now that we have that done, focus on fixing everything up. If you really don't know much about how actual pixel art works, no biggie. I've linked to some really nice tutorials and guides in the thread here. It's not an overnight thing, and practice helps. If you want to enter something but aren't sure of yourself, do it anyway! I'll give some constructive criticism for you to learn from.

Anyway, start fixing everything up. Any weird, anatomical oddities and line art oddities.


There, there we go! Looking much better. Hey, remember what I said about needing to fill in details every so often? Grovyle is usually portrayed with veins (lines) in its head leaf. These cannot be portrayed in the sprite, though, since the sprite itself is just too small to succesfully include them. So, instead, the artists felt it would be best to just leave it out. Let's add those in.


Here's what we have so far. Let's fill in with the base colors, then start on the shading. Also, now would be the best time to make more corrections if need be.

[Chibi Altaria]

And in the time it takes you to make ten, I made a Raichu. xD Had to totally redo the feet cause the actual sprite was so bad. *shudders*