In the past four weeks, I created this large fighting game sprite commission! Despite it’s length, the turnaround was faster than my previous commissions taking me more than a month on an off with streams on my Twitch Channel. I’ll go through the process creating it all from the start.

Sketching

I jumped around sketching ideas for the pose in both Procreate on my iPad and Clip Studio Paint to nail down an armor design and a solid pose. The bottom two sketches were made to stay inline with the non-anthropomorphic references given by my client. For All other references needed, I compiled them in my PureRef board.

Much of the armor design is typical of my fantasy work, but my client wanted armor in line with the main character from the game, Blasphemous.

After taking creative liberties adding thorns to the dragon’s horns for the armor design, I was going in the right direction.

Pixel Block-In

Now working with first sketch, I begin sketching the pixel art in Aseprite to get down the major shapes of the armor and wings. At this stage, this isn’t to start with refined line art, but getting shapes down to work with later. With all this, I default to Brandon J. Greer Gameboy color palette to not worry over coloring either.

Once all the important shapes are down, I dive into my saved collections of palettes and find colors close to the references and consistent as a palette. I collect a bunch of palettes from Lospec that I mix for good hues and tones I want in my sprite. I used a mix of Mushroom, Sand 6, and cooled down greys for the armor to get my desired result.

Animation Planning

To plan my animation out, I made a pencil test with Clip Studio Paint before diving into the pixel animation in Aseprite. It’s the first time I used timing charts to plan my animation after finding a tutorial by Plainly Simple to explain them and why to use them. Trying it was odd at first, but it cut down the time I’d spend replay my timeline to guess the timings when spacing needs reworking instead.

To animate the scarf and rope belt, I used Juice FX to save me the headache of figuring out wind physics, It’s not perfect, as the render defaults to 60 fps, and skipping frames results in imperfect loops, so I needed to make due, repositioning each frame.

With this in mind, I did my typical lasso and rotate method of pixel animation for the first block ins. Thinking back, it give it a “tweeny” look that I could’ve improved on for the future.

Pixel Polishing

With everything is nailed down, there’s the matter of animating the tail. I should’ve did more research on how large lizard tail should move, but I neglected that and intuited the movement myself. Despite that, I made good strides refining the animation in the polish stage.

A big snarl that frustrated me was animating the close wing. My regular method jumbled the pixels to an incoherent mess. So, I hid that old wing layer, to make a new animation layer and reworked it all without the spots to start cleaner.

At this point of editing the animation, I was loosing mental steam and wanted to get the polishing finished already. With the cleaner set up for the wings, the frustration simmered down enough to go through the motions refining the color shapes for clarity.

Wrapping it all up

From nothing to something, the animation turned out fantastic! According to my Toggl Timer App, I spent 37 hours, 37 minutes, and 47 seconds to completing this from July to August. I worked on it on and off, and there was a short period of time where work was interrupted by playing Blue Prince but I managed to push through.

I could’ve left it all as a two frame animation and be plenty to offer. But, I went above and beyond for my pride and justification charging $400. I might reduce my future commission prices to lower the scope on my next commissions but for now, I’ll leave it all as is.

Finishing it up, I made a simple blue gradient background with a Glass Floor script in Aseprite and a CRT View filter to push to authenticity and it all wraps in a nice bow! The final sprite came out to 194×165 pixels! It’s slightly taller than Urien’s sprite in Street Fighter 3 at 105×124 pixels!

If you want to commission me for a cool pixel animation yourself, you can hit me up on my Commissions page to see my prices! I pride myself if being professional and punctual with my work!