[Showcase] Animated mew sprite based on the expedition TCG card

[rofltje]

Edit: hereby I show the final version of the mew animation!

Hey everyone! Back in the day, I used to make a few sprite arts: I find these to be some of the most endearing ways of portraying pokemon, with the Ruby/Sapphire and Diamond/Pearl era holding a special place in my heart.

Recently, I have come across some amazing spritework of TCG cards by Cataclyptic, who has used them for his second generation neo TCG game (I definitely recommend checking it out!). Amongst these was a sprite of the expedition mew card, one of my favourites. Major credit goes to him for his mew sprite, as it was the basis for my works.
I made an emerald era version of this sprite by recolouring amongst making some other adjustments. Next I created an emerald style background and finally I animated the sprites:

I ended up making some additional sprites (and made some slight adjustments to Mew's head) which I did not animate yet:

Finally I also made another animation, particularly focused on mew performing a tailswipe (which took me longer than I would like to admit =p):

Here is the full spritesheet for that animation, along with the frame(s) in which each sprite belongs:

I hope people enjoy these sprites, they were a lot of fun to make! 😊​

 

[rofltje]

Reserved post for later updates.

 

[rofltje]

Had some fun updating the animation:

Have not incorporated it in a background yet, will see when I have time

Edit: here is a final update on the animation of mew, adding in some idle cycles.

Will work on the background once I find the inspiration. Noticed the forums are rather dead anyways so no idea who is actually interested =p

 

[HubaLibre002]

How do you do it? Are you a magician?

 

[BearKuda]

This is amazing! definitely saving this!

 

[rofltje]

Thank you for the kind replies! I have since actually finished the pixelart by putting significant work into a background:

Props to the people who can guess which specific area I refer to with this background 😉
Putting it all together, the final piece looks like this:

As for how I made all this, the main tool is perhaps also the most basic tool: paint. In it I can design the main sprites frame by frame, and by clever placement I can scroll through them to see how the animation will look. This takes the most time, and I improve the pieces by adding in small increments. Next, I make a sprite sheet with all the frames of an animation which I then split into a seperate image per frame with the pinetools online split-image tool (this way I do not have to save ~700 frames by hand). Finally, I use the online EZgif tool to combine all the frames into a single gif (using 10ms per frame).
Of course there are some smaller tweaks I make throughout the design (such as using powerpoint to transition between colour pallettes, not kidding 😆) but these are the major steps I use.

For now I am content with this animation piece: it will probably be a while before I sprite anything new (it takes inspiration and a lot of time). When I do though, I can add the works here if people are interested 😉