[llamabeast]

You're a legend Burnsaber, that's a really excellent tutorial. It seems we use very much the same methods on the whole. I think that kind of systematic bit-at-a-time with lots of copying and comparison with existing sprites is definitely the way forward.

Once or twice I've made original sprites from scratch (like the Anubite in Tomb Kings, which is definitely not my best work but is tolerable). When I did that I simply drew something from scratch which was absolutely terrible, and then went through similar processes to those here to gradually converge on it being tolerable.

Oh, one other thing. When you want to change the colour of something, you can just select it (using the select-by-colour or some other clever method in GIMP), and use Hue-Saturation (or Colourise for grey things). I use these loads, and might, for example, use them to make that grey arm brown. It generally takes a bit of messing around to match the colours correctly, but probably saves time. In simpler cases (e.g. I want this red robe to be blue) it saves loads of time.

Actually all the options under "Colours" in GIMP get lots of time from me. I like Brightness-Contrast too. For example, when doing the skeletal horse in Nehekhara, I started by copying KO's skeletal horse, but it didn't have proper ribs. So I just drew the ribs in, using only two colours (light for rib, dark for in-between-rib). Then I needed to add shading, which could have been laborious. Instead I selected say the bottom four-fifths of the rib cage, and made it darker using Brightness-Contrast. Then I selected say the bottom three-fifths and did the same again. Then a few times more with smaller sections each time, so the very bottom bit got darkened quite a few times. I might then have decided that the back of the ribcage should be darker than the front, and darkened another couple of selections. By darkening regions in thsi iterative way it's easy to end up with really nice shading without too much work.