Tips needed for making in battle trainer sprites

[Stupid Dinosaur]

As someone who has done much much art, but little pixel art, I am currently struggling with making the smaller pixel art in battle trainer sprites for a project I'm working on. I can do concept art and larger sprites VS just fine, but once I have to scale them down for in battle sprites, I'm struggling.

Any advice/rules of thumb you follow when creating these sprites? Making people with such a simplified amount of space is super strange to me, so if anyone would be down to give me pointers and tricks it would help me out a lot :)

 

[Fairy]

Hey! We actually have a pixel art tutorial here if you'd like to check it out! :)

https://www.pokecommunity.com/posts/8907945

It doesn't explicitly cover Pokemon spriting, but it's a great resource for the foundations of pixel art and may give you the insight you need to make your sprites. But I know how you feel, I was a traditional artist before I ever became a pixel artist, and the learning curve was much steeper than I had anticipated! If I can offer any decent advice, it's to start easy. Do a trainer recolor first, then maybe move on to some basic edits to get a feel for translating characteristics into such a small space. I also suggest you should sketch out your backsprite and pixel over it while using multiple references of other trainer sprites as a guide (which you seem to already be doing!).

Naturally though, like every other art on earth, the best way to improve is practice and time.

 

[Stupid Dinosaur]

Hey! We actually have a pixel art tutorial here if you'd like to check it out! :)

https://www.pokecommunity.com/posts/8907945

It doesn't explicitly cover Pokemon spriting, but it's a great resource for the foundations of pixel art and may give you the insight you need to make your sprites. But I know how you feel, I was a traditional artist before I ever became a pixel artist, and the learning curve was much steeper than I had anticipated! If I can offer any decent advice, it's to start easy. Do a trainer recolor first, then maybe move on to some basic edits to get a feel for translating characteristics into such a small space. I also suggest you should sketch out your backsprite and pixel over it while using multiple references of other trainer sprites as a guide (which you seem to already be doing!).

Naturally though, like every other art on earth, the best way to improve is practice and time.

Thank you a lot for the tutorial! I feel like a fish out of water when it comes to pixel art lol. Traditional --> pixel is strange. I've been practicing a lot, which I agree, is really the only way to truly improve. I just really hope that I can get good at spriting so that I'm not limited by what I can and cannot do. I'll keep hacking at it until I get it up to the level that my traditional art is at :).