@Speed-X

I usually use Photoshop to animate it, pull up the Timeline window. I believe it's possible to do on GIMP and Paint.net too. Essentially each layer is treated as one frame of the animation and you rotate from one frame to another, each frame you hide one of the layers above. Like peeling an onion. . u .

Ooooh. Then I could probably make a tutorial on this real quickly here...






If you can see from the three four pictures above how the shades of color swap places to the one next to it? Next all you's gotta do is piece them together as an animation. Now, since Photoshop allows me to just put it together and save animations into a Gif, that's great. However, this can be done even on paint. You just have to save each frame seperately one at a time, then get a Gif animating software or use an online one to build the gif and upload each individual frame onto it.



It will hopefully turn out like this. C:

I hope this answered your question. Understandably you'd think, the larger the sprite the more effort has to be put into it. Actually, the smaller, normal sprites aren't all that easy either. The main idea of these animations are taken from the spriting technique I found online, called "Inferno" where the sprite of pokemons were basically shaded in a way that made it look (At least to me), glowing. But I thought would it be cool if I could make individual layer of shades move inwards/outwards/both? Of course, you'd have to do banding on this... I think? Maybe. Perhaps you can do it without! It's all just an experiment that I find super fun. ^w^