Make a silhouette that accurately depicts the form you'd like your monster to take. Make sure not to make the silhouette too large (unless you are going for the cartoonish look via earthbound on purpose), as we are trying to squeeze as much detail as we can in a small area.

• We will not be going through the same trouble as Squaresoft did by drawing, inking, coloring or painting and color reducing or whatever steps of grandeur that i suspect Squaresoft used to create their sprites for their latter rpg's. Instead, we are going to start off with a silhouette. One thing that we are going to have to be careful about is making the silhouette too big. We are going to be crunching in as much detail as possible, and if we make the silhouette too big, we are likely to space our pixels out moreso than they have to be. There is a good way to estimate size of your silhouette, basically based off of the strength weakness of the enemy. For instance, your normal, below run of the mill weakling monsters should probably be around 32-40 pixels in width and/or in height. Normal sized human figures would do well to use a sprite size of 45-64 pixels depending on height variations. If perhaps you are drawing a bigger beast type character or mid size boss enemy, 64-80 pixels tall/wide would be appropriate, and your giant endboss type enemies should be around 128 pixels tall/wide.

Ive allowed a canvas size of 64x64 for a midsized enemy to use in this example. Despite this room, our Lich, only takes about a 56 pixel height, and a bit shorter than that horizontally. try to get the silhouette pretty close to the final design that you would like to use.

Add your shadow tones to give your sprite depth and form. Dont concentrate much on detailed dithering, there is still alot more contrast to add first. Your image should still be a silhouette in nature, just with a bit more form.

• Now pick a midtone for your sprite if you havent already done so with your silhouette, and flood fill or color replace that midtone instead of the previous silhouette color. In our Lich's instance, a dark, desaturated crimson blue tone should work well, to give him that smokey grey cloth color. Then pick an absolute shadow/outline tone to rough in the darkest folds and nooks of your character. Remember that the farther into the background a limb or tail or other extension might go into the background, the darker it will be relative to the elements in the foreground. Next, pick a second darkest shadow to smooth in the dark outlines with your midtone color that youve chosen. Also, fill in some finer details that would be a bit more subtle with this next darkest shade. At this point, your sprite should be looking pretty "shady" and dark, almost like the evil spirit version of what youd expect your character should look like. This step is what is going to give your sprite the illusion of depth, even without highlights. Our lich only really has 1 hue, but if your enemy has 2 or 3 different hues, there should be 1 ultimate "outline" tone, which would be near black, which would be shared by all hues, and then your second darkest shades might be hue specific. Once you are satisfied with what "depth" direction your sprite is taking, proceed to the next step.

For each hue, "build up highlight tone after highlight tone to form tightly packed bands of detail, whether that be cloth folds, muscle striations, or whatever other texture applies to your monster. Make sure there is always a buffer between your new highlights and your older mid and shadow tones.

• *Sigh* Ok, here is where we start our highlight "layering" process. one of the secrets to creating very detailed images in a small space is to have very thin areas of high contrast. If you were to look at any FF6 enemy sprite, you would never find a space that was solid color for more than 2-3 pixels. There is always another cloth fold, or another muscle strand or what have you that could fit in that area to squeeze more detail into a sprite. This is how you give the illusion that your pixels are indeed tinier than everyone elses pixels. So from here on out, we are going to start picking lighter and lighter highlight tones and building them up to ultimately illustrate tightly packed "strands" of higlighted detail. A fair warning to be given now, if your tones do not have enough contrast, your sprite will appear extremely blurry and "cloudy" or "pillow shaded". Color selection is crucial throughout this process.
Now lets pick another midtone, one for each hue, make sure its lighter than any previous tone you have picked out, and pixel over all the areas hit by light so that the previous midtone you had layed down serves now only as a buffer between your new highlight tone and the shadow tones.
Repeat this process with a new "highlight tone", (quoted because at the end of the process it may be a mere midtone) and pixel over all the regions where you have wide open areas of your previous highlight tone. Make sure that there is a buffer between your new highlight tones and the older, darker midtones and shadows, otherwise your details will look jagged, and not smoothly blended. Notice how the folds in the hood and cloak around the neck area are really taking nice form.

Repeat the previous steps, only this time, if you notice wide open areas of a single tone, use some shadow tones to throw in some more texturing, or highlights might do the same job just as effectively if that particular area already looks pretty dark.

• Once again, we are adding more highlight tones ontop of the old ones per hue. at this point, you should have smooth, defined, tightly packed regions of detail within your sprite. I also would expect you to have some areas of rather empty space at this step. Now is the time where you can go back and fill in either shadows to define depth, or add highlights to further polish more detail into your image. For instance, In our Lich, we have some pretty wide open areas of midtone around the front part of the cloak on the torso and feet region. To remedy this, ive gone in with some shadow tones to define the existing cloth folds a bit. In the next step, i went even further to add more highlights in those areas to increase the total area detail.

Throw in your last highlights if your sprite still does not have enough contrast, same as the previous steps. Make some last minute contrast changes if your sprite details are not sharp and crisp. Soften your perimiter outlines if they are near a heavily highlighted area to avoid jagged edges.

• In this final step, I've done some palette management. First off, ive desaturated the colors in PSP with their hue/sat/luminousity toolbar. My second adjustment was adding a bit more contrast in my existing colors so that the details popped out a bit more than they were in the previous step. Also, ive changed the purple hues in the flame into a more blueish hue. After i did that, i picked one final highlight tone, and repeated the previous to steps to give those clothfolds a bit more of a "pop" effect. Also, if there are areas on your sprite that are highlighted near the perimiter outline, and you have a dark outline bounding that area, ( In the Lich's case, the outline ontop of the hood and near the back edge of the cloak had dark outlining near relatively highlighted regions) soften those perimiter outlines up a bit so that the sprite's edges do not appear too jagged. If you have enough contrast, those highlight tones should pop out enough on their own against the background to distinguish those bounds of the sprite's edge. Add any last minute details, and smoothen out all of your highlights with AA if they appear too jagged. If you have any disgustingly jagged outlines, as seen on the edges of the staff in the previous step, now might be a good time to fill out those outlines as well. If your colors dont have enough contrast and your sprite is looking awfully blurry at this stage, adjust the contrast! if it doesnt fix itself with whatever autofunctions your paint program can provide, then try hand picking the colors yourself to see if you get a better result. If this still is not working, you might need to go in there and add some more shadows or highlights in your image to create those extreme "valleys" and "hills" that are needed to make your sprite pop. Without this level of detail your sprites will suffer the fate of mediocracy.