Nine: Useful Links

Other Tutorials

The Crash and Bass Ten Commandments: A quick summary of the top ten things to be avoided in sprite comics. The Ten Commandments are the top guide for sprite comics and every comic author is expected to know them.

Maneko's tutorial comics: Tips and nonos from one of the best comic authors around, neatly packaged in comic form for those with shorter attention spans. :p

The Bob and George Guides: These guides are written for newcomers, and include a lot of basic information.

How Not to Run a Comic: A collaborative production showcasing what webcomics often do wrong, usually humorously.

SpriteArt.com: This site is geared toward pixel artists, but includes several good tutorials on the basics of spriting.

Software

The GIMP: Short for the GNU Image Manipulation Program, the GIMP is a powerful image editing program that will more than fulfill anyone's spriting needs. If you download the optional animation package, you can use it to make GIF animations as well.

Paint.NET: This appears to be a ramped up version of MS Paint that attempts to be more powerful than Paint without losing Paint's simplicity. It will only work on computers running Windows XP. Be warned, however, that Paint.Net is still in beta, and there are still bugs that need to be worked out.

Fonts

Blambot: Some of the fonts here are free, and some aren't. This site is specifically for comics, and has many good speech and effect fonts.

Sprites

Sprites Inc.: This site hosts nothing but Megaman sprites, and has an impressive collection of them, too. This is the only place you need to go to if you're looking for Megaman sprites.

The Shyguy Kingdom: This is a good place for a large variety of sprites, from many different games.

Public Domain Sprites (Bob and George forum): The Bob and George community has made a large collection of edited sprites and released them to the public domain in this forum thread. There's a lot of useful stuff here, so be sure to take a look! (You must register with the forum to view the thread. Sorry. There's nothing I can do about this.)

Backgrounds

The Background HQ: Run by a group of outstanding background makers and rippers, the BGHQ hosts a huge variety of ripped backgrounds and many custom made ones as well. (Don't forget to credit the maker if you use one of the custom backgrounds.)

Criol Inc. Backgrounds: This is a collection of backgrounds all made by hand (either total scratch or heavy edits) by a good friend of mine. They aren't quite PD, so read the usage rules before you use the backgrounds.

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