I'm planning on restarting Pokémon Amethyst from scratch, and have decided to use a larger screen resolution. There's no point in limiting yourself to DS resolution if you're not actually making a DS game.
Anyway, this means I'm also going to need all the Pokémon resprited to a higher resolution (in this case, 160x160). Obviously, I'm not going to attempt doing this by myself; it would take years :P
So I thought, why not make this a public resource to which anyone can contribute, and anyone can use? It would be selfish of me to keep such a project for my own use; besides, if it's public, people are more likely to help out :)
Here are some examples of what I mean (I made these in about an hour each yesterday):


Red is there for size comparison; I hate it that the official sprites are often not to scale (e.g. Pikachu in 3rd gen). This Gligar sprite is to scale; have a look at its dex entry (it's surprisingly big). Having the sprites to scale will also make the job a bit easier, since for smaller Pokémon like the aforementioned Pikachu, you wouldn't have to make it much bigger than the D/P sprite. I'm probably not going to use Red's sprite in-game.
Both sprites use 16 colours; Red's are taken from his official artwork, while Gligar's are from its HG/SS sprite. I used 4th gen shading on the Gligar.
I didn't do the backsprite, but I think it would suffice to resize and clean up the Platinum backsprites, which is pretty easy.
I was originally planning to do multiple frames - a 4-frame idle animation, as well as attacking and hurt frames. However, I've decided against that for now, as it would drastically increase the time it would take to complete this, and 99% of people wouldn't have a use for those anyway.
A new sprite resource would be useful for everyone. Existing spriters would have a larger pool of sprites to use for fusions, and would be able to make more detailed sprites. Wi-fi traders would have a different set of sprites to use for their trade threads. ROM hackers would have better sprites to use for their title screens. And game developers would be able to increase their resolution without pixelating everything. Finally, anyone contributing can use this as a chance to improve their sprinting skills and get feedback.
So, do any scratch/pixel-over spriters want to help out? I'm going to post this on other forums too, to try and get a largeish group of volunteers. If we can get around 10-20 people, we should be able to get at least one, probably 2 or 3, sprites done per day between them (if each person makes a sprite per week, which isn't overoptimistic given that a sprite will take an hour or two to complete). This means the whole Pokédex could be complete within a few months. With more people, it could get done faster.
If enough people are interested, I'll make a new thread in the Pixel Projects forum, and start organizing everything.
A very ambicious desicion, that one.
But it seems like a good one too.. I might even try it.
Though, having the pokemans exactly to scale would mean that some would show only a quarter of them on the screen, and others would be as big as Red's foot.. I know this cause I've tried working in scale before. (See my avi)
I'd be better to have them in the 160x160 restriction, yet not to scale, more like how they are in the regular pokemon games, so that they all fit.
Also, some tiles I've been working on. 32x32 tile size, rather than the traditional 16x16.
Not for public use; these are for Amethyst only.

Ordinary grassy ground tiles. Revamps (sort of) of my current tiles.

WIP of tall grass. I still need to shade and fix up the bottom and right parts. It's inspired by HG/SS, and currently has a palette from those games; I'm going to change this eventually ;)
Any comments?
Yeah. I'd strongly advise against this, unless you'd want a fat cartoony style going on. Given how the pokemon style is already, being at double size would look unusually round and fat.. And with the way the square tiles look, ugh. Nope.
Were it for me, Id ditch 32x32 and go for something like 16x24, or 24x32.. And I'd get rid of grid movement as well, and go for a free 8-directional moveset, like Earthbound. That would imply more work on new OW poses, but it'd be worth a try.
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I can has back sprite shading advice?
Well, first off, the lightsource comes from where the opposing threat is (SCHOOLKID GWIN), instead of the back, so you should change the shades on the hair a bit.
Also, (This is more of a crit) the hair color is extremely yellow, and should be colored more naturally, like a bit more of brown or so. This, and how the hair ends in a straight line, makes her head seem like wearing a plastic yellow helmet or something.
Now to the body.. Lines on the arms look jagged, and might need a darker blue shade to AA it out. You also need to get rid of that ugly black line on her back.. And speaking of lines, don't be afraid to use line breaks; dark lines do not HAVE to be connected. In fact, sprites in this style look alot better in line breaks and sel-outs, like this:

(And notice that the face is already done this way.)
And last, I think you might be able to use this base I made when making a similar backsprite. First one is blank for custom poses. ;)
It uses 8 of the original pallete colors, btw. (My noobishness in hacking limits me to stuff like this everyday..)