Back to sprites

After many years, I recently started doing sprites again. I’m slowly learning to do games in GameMaker, and being able to do sprites should be useful. Even if they’re just placeholders for the time being.

So, here’s one attempt at making a player character. It’s just a rough form, no shading or proper colours yet, but I think it’s a decent start.

Any tips or criticism would be helpful, especially when I actually get around to coloring and shading, since that’s what I have most problems with.

Additional question: what program should I use? The current version of MS Paint is really frustrating, with weird issues. Scaling images 2x seems to be impossible without distoring the image, for example. (Using ctrl & +)

Paint XP is superior to modern Paint for pixel art. http://www.mspaintxp.com/

I’ve heard great things about http://www.aseprite.org/ which is available for a small price.
Seems like http://www.cosmigo.com/promotion/ is another popular choice.
There is also http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/us/

I haven’t tried any of these last three so I can’t speak about the quality. It’s also not a comprehensive list because I know there are many other fantastic options out there.

Happy spriting :smiley:

Looks like a person, which is usually a good thing.

I’ve recently transitioned to Photoshop CC for my spriting needs. Once properly set up it’s one hell of a beefy tool.

Photoshop.

Probably Photoshop. If you don’t want to spend money, either pirate, try Gimp, or try Paint.net.

Pose and proportions look good.