Spriting - Methodology

Methodology

There are several ways to create a sprite. Virtually all of these involve some way of "planning out" the form of the final sprite image. By laying out simple, and quick to draw suggestions of the final form, an artist can evaluate and correct the general direction that the construction of an image is moving towards, eliminating errors in perspective, anatomy, and foreshortening before the major work of drawing begins. These methods are very similar to other forms of illustration.

"Blocking" is what painters do: a spriter will lay out large regions of color/shade, trying to lay them in what he or she will think to be their final position, but starting with the biggest regions first. The artist will then sculpt these regions into the correct shape, and add in additional highlights and shadows to form the image, sometimes finishing the image by adding cartoon-like outlines to frame parts of the image.

"Line Art" is the outlining used to draw many styles of illustration. These are usually shades of black (Pure black or dark grey, usually) but this is not always true. It can stand on its own without coloration, and many spriters will draw black and white outlines of their intended final images before filling them in with color, and shading those filled regions. More experienced sprite artists will often color most of this line art; giving it a darker hue of the region it surrounds, rather than using jet black for all of their outlines.

After any of these methods are followed, the sprite artist will clean the image of any extraneous pixels unrelated to their illustration, apply proper transparency, especially to the blank canvas surrounding their illustration, and then export the image to a format suitable for sending to their client or friends. The PNG and to a lesser degree, GIF formats are suitable, and JPEG is notable for not being so - the lossy nature of JPEG compression often mars some of the finer details of sprites, but more importantly, can shift the colors of a sprite's pixels. Many videogames that use sprites require the sprites to use an exact, predefined palette of colors, and often create graphical effects by shifting these colors; any colors outside of this scheme will cause this to fail. Specific projects may convert the images to a proprietary format used internally by their game.