Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27105226-20151209221529/@comment-27105226-20160204220441

The less complicated ones take about 20 minutes, more complicated can take up to an hour. If I have to do effects (Such as Artoria Pendragon or Lancelot) it adds a considerable amount of time. If I have to recreate parts of the sprite covered by the text or buttons (Such as Asterios) it also adds time.

As far as my methods I have 2, an older one & a newer one.

New Method (Manual): Rebuild parts of the sprite behind buttons. Use the pen tool (Bezier curves) to make a path around all the edges. Path -> Selection. Invert Selection. Delete Selection. Add effects (Such as glowing swords, mist, etc).

The only reasons my sprites look really good is because of the pen tool... It takes extra time and is a pain sometimes, but it makes the edges nearly perfect...  It also leaves us the option to stroke the edges in the future if we decide to do so.

Old Method (Mostly Automated): I used a layer which only had the "Dull Blue Background" and subtracted it from the sprite layer. Supersampled the image to about 16 times it's original size. Created an alpha selection. Bordered the selection by x px, feathered by 0.5x px. Went back around the edge manually with an eraser to fix any hard borders. Then shrunk the image to it's original size.

It worked & was very quick, but It wasn't the quality I wanted out of the sprites... It was also fully destructive & left no options for changes in the future, so I swapped to the new method (All sprites done by the new method are  saved in .xcf format in the google drive).