Welcome to Gaia! ::

So I'm trying my hand at doing pixel art to create sprites for a gaming project a friend and I are working on.

I've never, ever done this, so it's all a little new. The point of this post is to gauge my probably shitty technique and get advice from anybody more knowledgeable.

My process: I draw what I want as a normal drawing (in this case, a monkey in a 'seated' position) on graph paper. Aside from his tail, the monkey fits a nice 8x8 area on the paper. What I do then is make an 80x80 area on MS Paint, switch on the grid, zoom in as much as I can, and separate by blue lines every 10 little pixel squares. At the end of this whole ordeal, it ends up looking like my graph paper.

I figure when it looks like this, it will be easy to follow a general 1 to 1 from my graph paper onto MS Paint's pixels, so when I zoom out it'll hopefully look dangerously close to the little monkey I drew on graph paper.

Is this smart? Is it too tedious? When I go to actually do the next sprite in the animation cycle, will this process come back to bite me in the a**? Please, tell me before I waste too much time!

Since you're going to animate this, I'd highly recommend flat shading/using max 3 shades per color/area.
Dithering and detailled colormaps are good for very, very simple animations and best when it doesn't move at all since they are awfully detailled and will look wrong when animated (esp. if you're not experienced).

THIS IS WHY YOU DON'T WANT TO DITHER:



Okay. I took a smaller, older thing I animated and took some screenshots to pinpoint how to approach this.



Layer 1, the basic layer, should first and foremost not come at 100% opacity since you might want to shove it around in the layer order to check against the others later.
This is the basic, rough outline/sketch of what you have planned in a color that you are not going to use.
Regarding colors that you are not going to use: Either you change the background color to something like hot pink that is not going to be in the sprite, or refrain from using pure white. In the frame's options you find the transparency settings, and whichever color you'll have chosen (pure white in this case) will later appear transparent and therefore be like an "eraser" while you are working.


I use another example here because, well, it's better to illustrate what I mean.
I'd recommend the next layer being rough outlines of the colors that you are going to use in each part, like you can see above. It'll be easier to just "color in" those bold parts later as well as form their outlines while you are working.
For more detailled work, a seperate layer is recommended in which you save the colors/shades that you are going to use since the menu really isn't too sufficient for that I believe. However, you won't need as many as I do here, as I've said, since you're not going to dither.


Even though I personally rarely do that, I'd recommend doing another layer just for the outlines. Use the darkest shade that you are planning to use total of whatever color you're going to be using for that certain part and abuse the ******** out of the line tools that come with the program. Best is always for the lines to be smooth and 1 pixel in width, that just looks best.
The next layer should be the shading. Main color- Darker shade for shadows (abusing the line and fill tool can do wonders for your nerves)- In between shade to properly connect those two (recommended that you use the pencil tool for that) - Lighter shade of the main color for highlights. Rinse and repeat and you should be fine.



BROTIPS:
-Don't zoom in too far and zoom out regularly to check whether it even looks any good. If it isn't too big the "preview" window should work.
-You can animate directly in that program.
-The bigger the sprite gets, the more detailled you have to get, the harder to animate it'll be, except when you make bolder stilistic choices
-Decide on one color to replace in the main color palette to regularly change. Make your palettes on the canvas. (You WILL forget to change them back and WILL forget what color those fields once were, and you WILL miss them if that happens)
-Don't forget to make Layer 1 invisible at least when you've reached the "outline layer".