Pyre time, complete with progress stuffs.


Initial sketch in Photoshop. At 400% of the final size, I get a rough idea of what I want. Thick, bold lines work best for the next step. 5 pixel brush and my tablet are good friends for this step. I forgot to snag a pic of the stick figure/ovals I used to get my anatomy sorta right and the 20% visible sprites of Nekro, Zimmer, and Mercedes to get a somewhat consistent size when I shrink it down. Five to ten minutes to get it all right. I already had a clear idea of what I wanted for Pyre's stance, which helped. This phase of Zimmer's stance sprite took nearly an hour and a half and well over a dozen trashed ideas. Augh.


Shrink it down, use the Threshold feature of photoshop to get it down to two colors. Easy enough. Five seconds of "work."


Fine tuning of my lines. Proportions adjusted and whatnot. These lines remain mostly unchanged for the remainder of the process. So far, this step for all of the sprites has taken around twenty minutes or so. Pyre took a few minutes less than the others, but not a noteworthy amount of time less. I think that's just me getting into my groove with this process.


Flat colors added. I pilfered these from my alternate palettes for now. They'll change eventually, but it's too early to spend a lot of time getting the perfect palette. That'll come later. A few minutes worth of paint bucketing.


Blown up again, this time up to 200%. Magic wand tool to select my flats, eyedropper to select my shades, 2 pixel pencil to throw some sloppily neat shading in place. Really rough coloring stage. I find it easier to get the crazy curves that every sprite inevitably have to look decent with a blown up sprite. Significantly easier. What would have taken me four times as long at regular size took me about five minutes in Photoshop at double size. Then I shrink it back down, as seen here.


Fine-tuning. The most important phase. Adding in the remaining shades, redoing the existing shading, yadda yadda yadda. Completing the sprite. Time varies. A lot. Pyre took about half an hour. Zimmer took almost two. Nekro... maybe 45 minutes? Mercedes took a full day, but she doesn't count this time. I was still figuring out what I did and didn't want in the style.


Palette tweaking. Finally the arrangement of my colors makes a little sense. Photoshop and layers are your friends. Four layers, actually. Flats, darkest shades, mid shades, and highlights. Both of the shade layers are pure 785E91 set to multiply. The darkest layer is 100%, while the middle shades are 50%. Highlights are pure white set to soft light at 100%. Those settings seem to produce pretty sweet results. Pyre is the only exception so far. His chap highlights are separate from his gold ones. They looked entirely too shiny, so they got set to 50% opacity. Blah blah. I don't know... ten minutes to set up the layers? Varying times to pick palettes that look right. I already knew what I wanted for Pyre, so his took no time. The stuff I used was pretty close already, so whatever. It's almost identical to the original sprite in the first post in the thread. His design didn't even really change that much, which is odd. Everyone else changed pretty significantly in my big stack o' ESP.er sketches, but Pyre only went through the two designs you've seen in this thread. Huh. Alas, I digress.


After some minor palette tweaking. He didn't need much. I believe he's done.