Pokemon Spriting Terms and Styles
Meh, I was bored so I decided to write this, hope it come in handy for new people and for the ones who have been spriting for a while. If I forgot something important, you want me to add something or you just know any styles that I should add to a certain category (even if it's your own) just PM me. Here it goes:
[Recolors]
-- Explanation & Normal recoloring: One of the basics of spriting, if you are going to enter the pokemon spriting world this is where you must start. Basic recoloring is all about getting two pokemon sprites and by looking at their linework colors + base and shading colors substitute the colors of one with the colors of the other. Although recoloring seems a boring process it can be easily done by using the select color tool in MS Paint, after that you can select the color that is going to be replaced by left mouse clicking on it and using the same tool again choose the color that will replace that one by right mouse clicking on it. When both colors are selected by using that process use the eraser tool and use it on the sprite that is being recolored by keeping right mouse button pressed instead of left mouse button.
-- Shadow: This type of recoloring only requires that the pokemon is almost completely (excluding eyes, mouth and some other body parts) colored of purple and respective shadows, highlights and linework.
-- XD: This type of recoloring requires three colors and respective shadows, highlights and linework. Two of the colors are dark purple and white, most of the pokemon must be colored purple although some parts like leaves, belly, flames must be colored white/light grey depending on the pokemon. Red is finally used for the eyes of the pokemon.
-- Evil: An evil recolor uses a similar process to XD except the colors are Black and Red instead of Purple and White.
-- Flag: A flag recolor normally is based on a certain country's flag, for example an american flag recolor would use red, white and blue colors.
-- Gold & Silver: This type of recolors normally needs a couple of extra colors for shading and highlighting. For Gold you are going to need mostly a dark yellow base and shading with a big ammount of white and light yellow colors for the outline to give it that real gold feeling. For Silver use grey instead of dark yellow.
-- Egg: get an egg and change its color, not much to say about it.
[Revamps]
-- Explanation: A Revamp is a sprite from an older version that you take and put it in a newer version format, that does not only mean you recolor it, you must add more colors for shading and work a lot to improve the linework so that the old sprite will be similar to the one of a newer version in every aspect other than position and size. Although many people are used to consider a pokemon revamp as an older GB version to Advance format, anything that is transfered from an older version to a newer one is considered a revamp and therefore taking a sprite from Blue version and making it similar to the one in Gold version is also a revamp. Most older versions have poor light sources or no shading at all which make it more difficult to revamp them. I will explain the goods and bads of each version. A software I recommend for revamping, as well as any other kind of sprite work is GraphicsGale Free Edition.
-- Green/Red/Blue: These versions only use 4 "colors", those are: black, white and 2 shades of grey. This distribution of colors does not give us much flexibility to calculate where everything should go, the highlights seem to be placed in the right spots though so you shouldn't have to worry much about them.
-- Yellow: Pretty much like GRB except the 4 colors are now black, white and 2 shades of the main color of the pokemon, this does not improve much but helps. Appart from that, although the shading in the Yellow version is amazing the outlines are going to give you headaches when revamping.
-- Gold/Silver: All I can say about the Gold/Silver shading is: "realy bad". If you are going to make a revamp of a GS sprite make your own shading because the one they have is completely useless. GS sprites still use 4 colors, this time you can have 256 different colors or each one of the 4 if I'm not mistaken, linework is completely black and therefore won't help much with revamping.
-- Crystal: The good thing about crystal is that each spriteis an animation so it has more than one sprite of a pokemon and you can use any of the frames in the animation to recolor as a different sprite. Appart from that it is pretty much similar to GS.
-- Pinball, TCG e PLC: I dunno why anyone would want to revamp TCG cards but if you do be warned as the quality of them is not that good and I also don't know much about them. Pinball colors are pretty much similar to GS except that the shading and linework is amazing, if you are willing to finish the missing parts of pinball sprites and recoloring the sprite the outcome is really nice. Puzzle League Challange sprites don't have much to say about them as there aren't that many.
[Devamps]
-- Explanation and in General: Devamp is the opposite of a revamp, here you try to take a 32-bit color sprite of an advance game and make it similar to the ones of a certain game version. To know how to make that just look in the revamping section and see the good and bad aspects of each version, try to apply them to the devamp so that it looks authentic.
[Edits]
-- Explanation: An edit is when you take an existing sprite and modify it in some way, changing one or 2 pixels isn't really an edit unless it really makes a difference in a sprite (which it normally doesn't), there are many types of edits than the room I have to list them all therefore I will just list some of them.
-- Angel: You get angel-like wings of a certain pokemon, put them on the pokemon you want to turn into an angel (be aware of the sizes first so you can get the right wings), get light blue colors and recolor the pokemon, then add some extra details if you like and you're done.
-- Devil: Pretty much like the Evil recolor but you get some devil like wings and do the same procedure than the angel but with evil colors.
-- Type Change: Get a pokemon and make it look like it belongs to another type, not much to say about it except that it can be quite difficult at times.
-- Chao: I dunno much about chao edits, get a chao sprite and mix it with a pokemon but using the chao as base.
-- Ham-Ham: Same as chao but with hamtaro + pokemon sprites.
-- Baby: Get a pokemon sprite and make it look a couple of years younger to the point of looking cute and small.
-- Skeleton: Probably as hard or harder than a scratch sprite, you really need to understand how anatomy works to make these, take a pokemon and a skeleton like the aerodactyl one and try to make a skeleton of that pokemon.
[Mixes/Fusions]
-- Explanation: Take two or more pokemon and mix them together, the more you have the weirder it will look and the harder it will be to get it right. There are other types of mixes or fusions like the egg mix. Be aware that the size of the pokemon matters, if you try to mix something huge with something tinny you might have problems.
-- Egg mix: It is different of Egg recolor, instead of taking an egg and changing it's colors you make the egg look like a pokemon but keeping its egg shape.
[Scratch]
-- Explanation: A scratch sprite is one that you made from 0 with reference to nothing other than your brain and maybe a picture or so, you need to be really good to make a perfect scratch sprite with the right ammount of colors.
-- Drawing 2 Scratch: This one is a bit easier, take an image, resize it to the point where it is of the size your sprite will be, keep a copy of the non-resized picture next to you and using Graphics Gale and layers draw the basic linework, then make a pallette for your sprite by taking certain colors off the picture and paint, shade and highlight your sprite, then do the same to the linework and it should look great, have a look at my scratch sprites of Rukario, Bonsly, Munchlax and Mewtwo with armour, they were all made using this method and they look amazing.
[Animations]
-- Explanation: Animations are most commonly saved as gif files, a good program to use when converting bmp to gif files is giffy23 as it has a pallette optimizer so your sprites don't loose quality, GraphicsGale can also make gif animations. An animation works by saving a certain number of frames in the same gif file that will then display them at a defined rate.
[Items]
-- Explanation: Items in general can be edited just as pokemon, they can also be mixed with pokemon although it doesn't look too good. Most commonly edited items are pokeballs which can be recolored and decorated to make all kinds of different pokeballs.
[Trainers]
-- Explanation: Just as items they can be mixed between each other, with items and pokemon. Not much to say about them. One or more trainer parts are often used to make a new trainer.
[Charset]
-- Explanation: A charset is a table with walking sprites of a certain overworld character or object, in the objects case it might be a static sprite which ignores the walking ones by putting the same sprite in every frame. If you're not in Game Dev. or ROM Hacking you won't need to worry much about them.
[Faceset]
-- Explanation: Most pokemon games don't use facesets, they are usually a sprite of a characters face that shows up when you talk to that character in a game. (eg. Misterious Dungeon)
[Chipset/Tileset]
-- Explanation: It's normally a big "table" of tiles of the same size that make a charset. In pokemon, charsets are used to design maps for pokemon games or comics.
[Battle Sprites]
-- Pokemon: The sprites that show up in battle, you will be working with these most of the time.
-- Pokemon (Rear View): The back view of a pokemon sprite that shows up in battle, not so frequently used as the pokemon are seen from behind.
-- Trainer: The sprites that show up in battle, you will also be working with these most of the time.
-- Trainer (Rear View): The back view of a trainer, there aren#t many as it is usually only used for main characters in a pokemon game.
[Overworld]
-- Explanation: Overworld sprites include any sprite that is in the pokemon rpg's and that is part of the overworld (not in-battle) definition. Overworld are usually charsets and chipsets.
