Yet another tutorial for you little scamps. This time I'm going to try and sprite a character from a photograph I randomly picked off the internet. This is kind of an addition to the lessons learned in my other character art tutorial which you might want to read first if you never have before. So let's go.
We shall choose an image first. I wanted an image of a person from head to toe, it wasn't that easy to find so I just went with the first I found, which is this girl here:

hey cutey
So I took this image and cropped it and then brightened it up a bit just so I could really see it. Now, just like in the last tutorial I'm gonna draw a quick backround with a door and copy and paste this image into it on a new layer. Then resize it till it looks good next to the door [remember to hold shift!].

original and resized
Now that it's resized to the right height, I crop the image again getting rid of the backround I just hastily drew and leaving me with the pixelated woman. As shown in the image above I place both the original and the resized pic next to each other when I sprite just so I can see the details that get lost in the resize.
Now it's time to trace. Using the pencil tool and the colour red I traced the contours of the image as best as I could. And this is what I got.
The left leg looks a little odd and there are a few other pixel problems with it so I'm gonna go ahead and touch them up first.
There, I fixed it a little but I feel I'll have to go back and do a lot more touch up on the outlines while colouring it. Speaking of colour, that's the next step, I'm going to now colour the outline with a dark shade of what I want the insides to look like:
Like that. See what I ment now? Now, on a new layer I'm going to draw the actual colour behind the outline. I think I also touched up the outline a bit more when I was colouring it, and I forgot to erase the top of her head.
Okey doke, all filled in. So now we have the outline and the base colours, it's time to shade the wench!
I make a new adjustment layer of brightness/contrast and set it to like -40 brightness and +15 contrast or something, I don't remember, it's really up to you. Then I flood fill the adjustment layer with black and start to fill in with white the darkest shades.
using the original as a guide I shaded her as best I could. Adding the fold in her skirt and a small cleavage line on her top. There really isn't much to this image because of all the dark black she wears, but I shall continue anyway.
Now with a grey tone I'm going to add the second level of shadow to her.
I added a face and tried as best as I could to fix her clothing along with a shine in her hair. Her face doesn't reflect the original images' face but I think that's ok.
So that's it really... There isn't much else to this besides what you've already learned in the other character art tutorial. So then what is the point of this tut?
Well, many people said that my other tutorial was all well and good, but if you can't draw in the first place [which is impossible everyone can draw just fine!] than what are you supposed to do? So here is an alternative. Either find a bunch of pictures off the internet and just trace them, or get a camera and have your friends pose for you, and if you have no friends then pose for yourself. It's just that simple. So go forth, and make the games, because they are easier than you think!

and there she is, at an awkward 41x104 pixel height and at 18 colours not including the backround.

I hope this helped, please, comments and criticism are very much welcome, so please email me if you have anything to say.

eric
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