Spriting Basics: Recoloring and Fusing Tutorial

Bubbles · Apr 3, 2015

Recoloring and Fusing Tutorial

For this tutorial I will be using http://pixlr.com/editor/. Basically it is an online version of paint that is far less complicated than GIMP, and great for beginners.

Are you interested in Spriting? Have you ever asked yourself, how do they do it? Pokémon Sprites are usually the most popular to play around with, so I will be using them for this basic tutorial. This tutorial is image based, so please let the page load entirely before reading it.

Recoloring

Step (1)
Find a Pokémon sprite you wish to recolor. There are various databases to choose from. For this step, I will be using Pokestadium's sprite search tool.

http://www.pokestadium.com/tools/sprites

Just type in the name of the Pokémon of your choice in the search bar. I searched for smeargle, selected a sprite of choice, right clicked it, saved image as... [insert any file name of choice], and saved it to my pictures. Do this process with your sprite of choice.

Step (2)
Open pixlr editor (from the link provided at the top).
You should see this:

Select "Open image from computer"
Type in the name box in your "My Pictures location" the name you saved the sprite as. Make sure it was saved as either .gif or .png ONLY. Any other file will not work or will look bad.
This is how it should look now:

Step (3)
Now this is where you need creativity. Think of the colors you want to recolor to your sprite. Now search for an existing Pokémon with those exact same colors ex: white (Snover) Blue (Dragonair) Green (Sceptile) Pink (Porygon) etc.
If you want your Pokémon to look like a steel type for example, you would recolor it with a similar color palette that a steel type has like Steelix for example.
Repeat step one, but this time upload the Pokémon that you wish to use colors for.[/color]

Step (4)
Now it is time to apply the new colors.
First Zoom in on your sprite, I usually choose 600%-800%
You can do this by clicking the 100% at the bottom left of the window and deleting the 100 and replacing with the zoom % of your choice.
By clicking and dragging the small grey dotted box at the bottom right of the window, you can change the size of the box so that the page isn't as cluttered. You can move each window by clicking and dragging the top black area where the name of the file is located.
Here is what my page looks like so far:

Now onto the actual recoloring process.

Step (4.5)
Select the "Colorpricker" tool. Looks like an eye dropper, near the bottom. This will copy the color you select.
*This is the part in which you need to pay the most attention to*[/b][/u]
By using general knowledge, you should be able to tell which colors are the brightest and darkest on your sprite. To properly recolor a sprite, you must follow the sprite's shading. This means you must fill a light shade with another light shade or a dark shade with another dark shade. This keeps the sprite from looking messy.
Here I will show to recoloring process in step by step pictures. Remember, to copy a color use the colorpricker, and to paste the color onto the sprite, use the paint bucket tool. When using the paint bucket tool there is a drop down menu that says "tolerance." To keep similar colors from not mixing, change the tolerance to any value between 10-3 I'll be using 8.

Step (5)
Recoloring in the making~
-Abomasnow White ---> main body (First)
-Darkrai Black + Blue Eye ---> ears and facial features + tongue (Second)
-Scizor Red ---> painted tail (Last)

Zoomed Out (Regular)

w/ alternate dark shaded tail

Zoomed in (600%)

w/ alternate dark shaded tail

Note: Sometimes you have to fill the color for some pixels manually since the bucket does't always fill enough or it fills too much. Press ctrl+Z to undo a step, and to fill in individual pixels select the brush tool and select size one with the bottom square icon. Have fun recoloring! ^^

Fusing

Step (1)
Using the instructions for step one with recolors, similarily find a Pokémon sprite of choice, but this time choose two or more depending on how complex of a fusion you desire. For this tutorial I will be fusing Kirlia and Meloetta sprites. Open your sprites in pilxr, zoom in in the proper range and have your Pokémon side by side.

Step (2)
Now that you have your sprites next to each other, look for similar parts that could fit well on each other and decide on a "base" sprite. The base sprite is what you will be editing the most, as it will be the sprite that you will take one Pokémon's features onto it but at the same time the fusion will portray the base more. Once you have gathered your ideas and have a general idea on what you would like to do, try editing your base to that it is somewhat prepared for parts to be removed or attached for the fusion.

You might have to do some minor scratching to fill in some of the areas you erased.

Step (3)
Look at your Tools bar. There is a brown lasso, called the lasso tool directly above the paint bucket. Select that tool (or the select box/marquee tool) and click and drag over the area i which you would like to copy onto the other image. To copy have the selected area completed and then go to Edit-->Copy and then click the other image twice and then click Edit---> Paste. Then select the mouse tool to move the copied part. It becomes a separate layer, so you can only edit the copied layer now unless you go to the right and look at your layer tab and select the base layer. Note: Once the image is saved, all of the layers combine.

Step (4)
Repeat Step 3 and fuse your base sprite together with parts from the other Pokémon. This is where you can go mad with creativity and use your skills of merging things together and recoloring them so that they flow together into one fusion.

Final Product:

Overall, I hope my tutorial was able to provide a picture text explanation of how to sprite a Basic Recolor and Fusion using the Pixlr editor program. If you are interested in learning some advanced techniques, try exploring gimp. Pixlr is mainly for beginners or for those who want to do far less complicated sprite works.

Have Fun Spriting!