How to create your own Sprite Card (the ferret way!)

"Dook. Since sprite cards are a popular way of showing off your avatar, I figured I'd start a thread on how I go about altering an existing sprite card, and make it into something that looks more like a character you want."

"First... I use Photoshop. So don't mind me if I use a lot of terms from Photoshop. If you have an art program that works like PS, then go with that. And also, it helps if you know some basic commands and how to use Layers. Using layers isn't really necessary, but it saves me a BUNCH of trouble if I have to correct something. Anyways, on with the lesson."

"Ok, first we need some sprite cards to alter. You can go here for the original Card Fighter Clash 1 cards or here for the Card Fighter Clash 2 cards (which are a bit more updated than the originals). Both sets have their advantages. It really depends on what you need from them and what you can get out of them."

"I suggest you save both webpages to your hard drive. That should download all the images down onto your hard drive as well, making it much easier to access, in case the website is down."

"So, lets pick a character to sprite. For this example, I'm choose Keiran 'Kit' Chen as my sprite victim. Since I know what Kit looks like, now we just need a sprite card that I can modify to look like the kitsune."

"This sprite card looks sort of like Kit. The character has his hat, fairly similiar clothes, and looks mystical. Bingo! Lets open that card into our picture editor now."

"Gif format images are INDEX colors. Thats good for most things, but makes editing harder since you can't use layers. To fix this, click on IMAGE -> MODE -> RGB Color. That changes the image to RGB color, and you can now make layers. Cool. Now, we just have to go through the steps to create our kitsune sprite card. The following image is numbered, to show you the steps of how the card was put together."

Step 1: Create a new layer named MUZZLE and Zoom in on the picture, at least 400 to 600%. Select your PENCIL tool. Make the size of the pencil 1x1 pixel. If you want to find a good color, search the card indexes for a card with the color your looking for. A nice orange in this case. Just use the EYEDROPPER to get the color and get back to your original card. Now, all you have to do is draw in a muzzle shape, and just remove any excess that doesn't look right. Make sure you realize where the muzzle is, so that if something is supposed to block it from view, such as hands and clothes and power globes, you take that into account.

A good way of figuring out where a muzzle should start is find the nose of the character and just draw a line roughly where the top of the muzzle should go. Then draw the muzzle curve down to meet the chin. and jaw. If you drew too much, just use the Eraser. The 1x1 pixel eraser is a good option for fine tuning your muzzle. Then just tip the end with a nose. A few black pixels and boom... Muzzle.

A good thing to do though is to 'blackline' around the muzzle, so it looks like its 'cellshaded' like all the other cards. Just put enough black lines around the colored part, to make it look like a drawing. Not hard really.

Step 2: This is just a transparent view of the layer, so you can see what Step 1 covered over.

Step 3: Ok, time to color in the face and muzzle and the arm, since they're gunna be similiar colors. For the black paw, find a nice card with three colors that blend from gray to almost black. Change the 'bright' spots on the flesh to the lightest of the gray, then the middle color to the middle gray, and finally the darkest part to the darkest of the grays. Using the WAND tool an help you pick these colors out, if you don't want to do each by hand. You may need to unselect any pixels you don't want with the Marquees tool though.

Step 4: Lets color the hat... and... I didn't color the paw hand very well, so lets use the same colors we're gunna use for the hat for the paw. First... Make a new layer called HAT, and we're gonna select the different colored sections of the hat, and color them like we did with the paw.

Confused? Don't worry, it gets easier once you try it a couple of times. The main thing to remember is almost all sections of a sprite card that are a 'single color' will have a 'shadow' and a 'highlight' color as well. Thats 3 colors. Just use the lighter color for the highlight sections, and the darker color for the shadows.

Step 5: Time to color that shirt. Make another layer called SHIRT, and lets do EXACTLY what you did with the hat, for the shirt layer. The base color gets the base grey color, and the darker spots will get the darker color, and any highlight spots on the shirt get the lighter color.

Again, if you need help picking colors, go back and look at different sprite cards for colors that have already been used.

Step 6: Time to color the hair now. Same thing. New layer called Hair, and time to color it like before.

Step 7: You must be sick of me saying 'Repeat the steps above for *this*', by now. Guess what though? We get to do something NEW now! Make a new layer called 'EARS', and get your colors ready, and lets draw some ears on this foxy. No, you won't find any fox ears on any sprite cards to use, so get used to having to draw in some details. Just try and make the ears... Ear-shaped. You can check Kit's PA card for reference. In fact, you should have been using it the whole time to make sure it looks correct, compared to the sprite card.

Anyways, this is something you just have to do for yourself. Make the shapes about how you think they should look, then go back in and try and color them.

Step 8: Oh NO! We don't have any leaf for Kit's hat! We have to either make one, or find one in another sprite card and cut and paste it into card. Luckily, there is this sprite card that has a leaf we can use. Select the pixels of the leaf. You'll probably want to use the Marquees tool to select the leaf. Now go up to EDIT, and click COPY. Then click back on your original sprite card, and click EDIT again and then PASTE. BOOM! You have a leaf on a whole new layer. Just rename the layer to LEAF, and then move the leaf to where it needs to go with the MOVE tool. If you need to edit the leaf to get it to look like its behind the ear, do that. See? No problem for you!

Step 9: Almost done. Time to make Kit male. Yes, unfortunately, the character on the original card was female, so we need to make the front of Kit's shirt nice and breast-free. Just make a new layer named SHIRT, and start to color over the 'unwanted parts with the red of the shirt. Just alter it to look right, and use some of the darker red to make the shadow on one side of the shirt. It doesn't have to be quite so perfect, but it will look odd without some shadowing.

Don't forget to add the line down the front to show its a shirt that opens from the front, and a few pixels of dark grey on either side of the line to look like laces that keep the front bound together.

Step 10: Give me a nice smile. Grab your black color and your pencil and draw in a nice smile for your happy kitsune.

Thats just about it. This is another thing you just gotta try out for yourself. Only one thing left to do...

Time to get a name on the card. Make one last layer called NAME, and black out the existing 'title' on the card. Much like you did with Step 8, you can go back to existing cards for 'letters'. In this case, I need the letters to spell Kit Chen. Just copy the letters you need from one card, and paste them back into your new card. Use the MOVE tool to arrange the letters and you eventually end up with...

THIS!

"Ok... but its not QUITE done yet. First... click on the layer tool and FLATTEN ALL VISIBLE LAYERS. If you flatten ALL layers, it'll destroy the transparency and you'll have to go back and make that yourself. So just flatten all the visible layers. Then we need to get the image in GIF format, so we have to go back up to IMAGE at the top, click MODE, and then INDEX color this time. Select EXACT for colors, and then find the choice that doesn't seem to alter your colors. Once you do that, just click ok. Now just go to FILE, SAVE AS, and then save your new image as a GIF under a new name. TADA!"

"And... I know this didn't make a lot of sense, so if you have ANY questions, just ask."

"ALSO, if you have Photoshop, you can download the PSD file for this card so you can examine it. You will need Photoshop to use this file though. Sorry about that, anyone who doesn't have Photoshop."

"PS: This is just making small alterations. I didn't even get into cutting up cards for parts. It works a lot like Step 8 though, just instead of a single leaf, you go for whole parts of the card, like a hand with a sword. But lets just start with the simple stuff first."