Sprite Template Alpha

Greetings, and thanks for looking at my first-ever useful thing released under a Creative Commons (Attribution 4.0) license! (Unless I'm forgetting something! I am a little bit old.)

NOTE: The torso layer has a few "NSFW" pixels. 

This is a greyscale *sprite template* in a GIMP-native XPM file. I made it greyscale (and will continue to do so) because colorization tools work badly otherwise. You use this template by copy-pasting the original greyscale file, and colorizing each layer of the new file. Using the template makes it very quick to create a new character walk animation. This means you can crank out a whole batch of characters with minor distinguishing features, such as different skin colors, clothing colors, with or without a beard or hair, etc, in no time.

Best of all, you can actually use your finished sprites based on this template in your commercial endeavors! If there's enough interest, I will release at least one of these every month for the foreseeable future; otherwise, I will have to get a fast food job or something (mental health disability means being around other people is already too much work... using my actual skills at somebody's cube farm always ends badly for me, quickly).

This is my first go at pixel art outside of pure hobby work, and it's my first time figuring out how to make a template for this workflow. Comments are welcome, and may be incorporated into future templates, and/or updates of this template.

The download (a ~53K zip) contains more complete instructions for using the template, but it basically boils down to picking colors and applying them. I'll make a video ASAP demonstrating multiple versions of the process, since applying very dark or very light colors requires slightly different steps.

Some known flaws that will eventually be fixed:

• a barefoot character with pants will need some tweaks; north-facing pants look bad when character is barefoot
• shoes were not intended to be worn without pants
• side-facing hair and beard need better definition

Other considerations:

• this template, like most others I make for the immediate future, is 50x50; this character is very large for that size; the hat barely fits, in that size, and would look better if bumped upwards one pixel, for those who don't care about staying strictly within 50x50.

Other future changes that are likely:

• feet and hands could be better, and they might need to be a separate layer for some facings
• I wanted to add sleeves
• the general foot-shoe-pant relationship needs to be re-thought

I will periodically need to update the template to fix little mistakes (such as the fact that the north-facing pants are inconsistent enough to look terrible on north-facing characters), so here is (hopefully) a permalink to the relevant blog post, with the download link right at the top; that blog post will be updated with new file-links, as needed.

Any support, encouragement, credits given in your project, or telling your friends who make things with sprites, etc, is greatly appreciated and could really turn my life around. Anyway, thanks again for looking -- and if you've read all this, thanks for that too! I've spent almost two weeks on this beast, which I know is way longer than it looks like -- a lot of it was trial and error on things like best use of contrast, tweaking body shape definition on layers nobody's ever going to see, deciding where to begin and end each layer for different show/hide cases, how big each body part could be and still look proportionate, how many layers to break things into, etc. So I really appreciate any support or feedback if you use it!