The wireframe is crucial to maintain the anatomy and action pose of the sprite. If you are not satisfied at this stage, do not continue, or your satisfaction will only grow stronger. No use making sprites that are uglier than meee, bwahahha.

• Allll right, lets start! The most important part of our sprite, as many people fail to even think about, is our character's anatomy and pose. I've rushed into so many sprites without doing this step that its painful to think about! Let me stress this, if you skip this step, unless you are quite a master of the craft, you are undoubtedly digging your sprite's early grave... because the proportions will be compromised from the get go! They wont turn out nearly as pretty as me, and your sprite will not be a happy camper! You dont need to start off with much, just a suggested ribcage, a collarbone structure (shaped like a hanger), a waiste line, and some simple limbs showing the location of the joints. If you are stuck animating these bad boys, youd probably want to animate this wireframe before you even think about drawing a muscle or peice of cloth.

Next, we use the wireframe to draw a basic muscle structure and rough lineart version of our character. Notice that the Gi is loose around the midrift, which is often the case for a Ryu clone (its just the way these things fit the body). the arms only have minimal line definition at this point, and the legs are basically flat. We are just getting the basic shape of the sprite down at this point, though this version should be pretty much a rough version of what the character is going to look like when finished. If you want to make any drastic character design changes, do it here. For instance, you might want to add some fringe around the area where the gi cuts off to meet the shoulder line, like Akuma's character from street fighter. Maybe you might want to include some arm accessories or a toolbelt wrapped around his leg, add it all now, at least in a rough manner.

Go ahead and do some color fills for the skin and the gi. I then used the color replacor tool to form basic shadows cast from the bending of the legs and near the chest and arm. Note that the face was also shaded, to compensate for hair in the future. If your character is bald or looking upwards, this shading would not apply to your sprite. At this point your outlines should be color coordinated to match the contained hue selections, or something close to it at least. A dark red outline would stick out line a sore thumb around the blue gi, unless it were highly desaturated... in which case it might still be obvious.

• Waaakaaa, lets get to the fun part! the color! Hold your horses on the details though, we've got some more leg work to do. To be honest, colors are a bit arbitrary at this point, theres no doubt in my mind you'll be adjusting them later anyways, but if it pains you to be imperfect at any step, youll probably think long and hard about what colors to use. Ok, to begin with, we are only using a few shades. The first sprite is mainly just a color fill of one skin tone, and one cloth tone. Then, using the color replacement tool, I simply swapped colors around the leg areas to create that shadow which would indicate a bent knee. If your character is standing straight on his heels, you might want to keep your legs all one color. We are assuming mainly a topdown lighting source, its just easiest. If you were to use a side angle light source, The arrows on the second sprite would indicate general areas that would hit the sprite in this stance.

Notice that the head from the appropriately nicknamed,"head" tutorial was as a placeholder for this sprite. Its pretty gender independent in nature, so i threw it on there. The "28" measures the height in pixels of which the upper torso consumes. Ryu and ken sized sprites usually fit within a 25-30 pixel tall torso size, however their builds are alot wider than this sprites. It is not an absolute rule, and may even seem sort of short, but its the style often used by capcom, the whole short/wide torso thing which makes the characters look ultra beefy. This is actually a line art style issue, its pretty independent to the pixel process that takes place to color the sprite in. Theres no right or wrong, but merely a guide for you to follow if you would like to emulate the style. As long as it looks proportionate, right? Besides, you might want your sprites to be drawn larger, in which case you should look for an upcoming GGX sprite lesson! Alot of the same rules apply, but its just all on a larger scale. anyways...

The second sprite basically is another color swap, only this time, we are colorswapping the outline color into a darker blue to match that of the gi. At this part there is also a minimal amount of cloth lineart that was added to give the gi some life. No specific shading has been done, this is merely color replacement tool work, to shade general areas of your sprite. This is what is going to give you a sense of depth and a preliminary guide for shading. Note that the darker you make a shade relative to its highlight tone, the farther into the background that object would be pushed. For instance, if weused the shadow tone for the right leg as the highlight tone for the left leg, and used a 3rd, darkest tone for the shadows of the left leg, then that left leg would then appear to be pushed back way behind the characters center of gravity. This also works for arms, mainly any limb youd like come to think about it. The inverse is also true, the lighter the limb appears in comparison to the rest of the body, the farther it is pulled into the foreground. Note this optical illusion will only take place if it is coherent and true to the nature of the lineart. For instance, if you tried to make the right leg darker than the left leg to push it into the background, the effect would be achieved, but because the right leg was drawn to be in front of the left leg in terms of depth, then your sprite looks mighty illogical!

AA is the name of the game from here. Start to create some softened clothfolds and muscle structures to give your character some more detail. Also make any last minute highlight changes now. Notice how the characters right foot is no longer highlighted near the ankle, as it made the shin appear to bow too significantly. He cant fight with a broke ass leg now can he?

• Now comes some of the technical parts of sprite building. Some Knowledge of AA will be required, so go read up on that tutorial if you havent done so already. (P.S. i am not the samurai who wrote the tutorial, so go look under a different samurai's profile to find the lesson). What have we done here? Well, I've chosen 4 shades of blue to color in the gi. That general shading in the step above was crucial to form this stage of shading, because at this point, you are only refining detail. Thats right, the majority of the shading is already done! Now you are just going out to smooth the details of the cloth folds out, and adding some subtle definition in the arms. One of the major accomplishments at this stage, however, was the forming of the fingers.

Fingers are one of the most elusive pixel pushing details of any fighter sprite, yet they are ironically one of the most important. hands cannot look like spaghetti or else the sprite will look rediculous! Capcom defines their fingers very explicitly with dark outlines, but SNK uses negative space to form fingers, which are even more pixel precise than capcoms at times! read the hands tutorial/analyzation for more details on how to pixel these (one of my proud lessons ^_^ ) .

Ok from head to toe, here we go! Still havent touched the face, as it is not as important as getting the body down. The most notable feature of shading in the upper body is actually independent of the texture, whether it is cloth or skin. The feature is quite simple. See all the detailed lines in the blown up version? Notice that each detail line is only one tone darker than the tone that is being defined or outlined. If you make these too dark, then the smoothness of your sprite will be dulled, and the contrast will be too great. Your sprite, in a way, will look like a pen and ink illustration gone terribly wrong, with inkbleeds everywhere. The only places you should have considerably dark outlines are on the perimiter of the sprite, and if a limb overlaps another limb, or the torso. Individual fingers are also defined by these dark lines, but nothing else. The general rule is as follows. The darker the line the deeper the groove, or the greate separation of distance between the object that is standing ontop of another. For Instance, If our sprite's left hand were flush against his chest, the outline color might only be the 3rd darkest skin tone to illustrate that the distance between the hand and chest is minimal. However, if you were to use a pure black outline around that hand, without redrawing any details of the sprite, the hand would appear to jump off the body, giving it depth and dimension. This depth would become further enhanced by any shadows the hand might drop on the torso. Everything else, all the little subtle detail, they only use 1 tone darker than the tone beind defined in order to create smooth grooves.

Remember, if there is a groove or outline that is 2 shades or more darker than the tone that is beind defined, use a buffer shade to blend those defined features into the highlight (explained in the AA prerequisite tutorial, go read if you are lost). A good example of that usage here would be in the smaller cloth folds found in the legs and lower torso where the gi meets the belt.

Make your next pass of AA and subtle shading to smoothen out the hair and facial features. Last minute structure changes should be done now. Add dark outlines around the perimiter near regions that are heavily shaded, such as under the crotch or around the shins. Add a face and hair to your character at this point if you are satisfied with the character's body.

• Well, stick a face on the previous example and most people would be satisfied enough to call it finished, but if you are going for a more classic streetfighter style, you might want to throw on an extra highlight shade on the gi to make it pop out just a tad more. This is only possible of course if you havent gone over a 16 color limit, right? What? i failed to mention that? Well how stupid of me... let me explain now.

Alot of the oldschool fighter games used 4 bit, 16 color sprites. Why? well for smaller filesizes and faster animation rates i would presume, as adding an extra color to bump that up to 17 colors would add a whole bunch of extra data to the file that is pretty much wasteful. Also, if you are unrestricted with color, you are more likely to overshade, causing a pillowshading effect (where everything looks like puffy clouds with no definition shining through at all), So , for this exercise, you are to use only 16 colors, including the background transparency. Ive done this tutorial so far in such a way that we have only used several shades of color for only 2 hues for detail work. We started with 2 for the skin and gi each, and then gradually up to 4, 5 max colors for these two hues. Worst case scenario is that we have used roung 10 or so colors, maybe even up to 12. By the time you are ready to do the head and accessorize your sprite (next step) you should have a few palette entries left in your 16 color palette to include some new colors for detail work. At this stage i chose a red headband, which alone looks sort of silly... so we might have to find ways to use it else where in the sprite.

Basically at this point we have just added a head, which is explained more in the seperate "head" tutorial as mentioned previously. Remember, if you are adding more highlight shades, include a buffer shade to blend it into the darker shades. This also may require you to lighten up some of the detail lines to compensate for this extra light.

If you havent noticed at this point, check out the outline aroudn the areas of higlighted regions of the gi. Notice how they arent outlined. While this is purely a stylistic choice of shading, it is a great way to help eliminate unsightly perimiter outlines. All the underlying details should be finalized at this stage, the sprite should have perfect form with only a few corrections that have left to be made... which we save for the next step.

This is the final coup de gras, put on all your extra accessories that you would like to use to give your sprite a bit more flare. Also, this is where your saturation changes or hue swaps should be tweaked. Brightness is good, but burning retinas is bad! Note that the cloth is more saturated with color than the skintones. Voila, what a sexy beast!

• Not much left too it! ive saturated/darkened all of the colors a tad to give him some added pop! The red used in the bandana needed to be reproduced and reused a bit more throughout the sprite, I had the luxury to add one more bright red highlight to make the headband and stripes really gleam in the highlighted areas. Notice the trimming is highlighted in accordance to the general shading of the gi, the highlights hit the same spot, which helps to give the gi form. If these highlights are inconsistent to the gi's, your striping will look silly, and your sprite will surely get angry at you for making him so ugly! Good thing this guy didnt turn out ugly or else i would not have claimed credit for drawing him, hahaha. Whatever bad sprites you make along the way to practice your style and technique, just blame em on st0ven... or your dog... yes, your dog. Ok this time im late for a date with my sexy pillow, but you should become an insomniac if you ever hope to get much better :) sweet dreams! (for me, muahaha).