I recommend drawing in paper first, seriously. After that, you can always buy a pen tablet and make pixels with them. Also, how high is your SAI stabilizer? The lines look very stiff.
you just need to make a lot of pencil and paper draws before to run on a digital paper.
I think that you may need to copy sprites that you want to make. take those from blablue. copy them. trace them...
use the curve line and straight line
I think you can do nice things!
They have a point. It takes a lot of practice for those BlazBlue spriters.
Point is, I suggest referencing some first //like what I did with my non pixel art :p// That way, you have a sense of anatomy and all the basics. Remember, your body isn't made out of weird, random, solid shapes. It's a three-dimensional masterpiece made out of cylinders and spheres. Make sure your light source is consistent (no pillow shading plz) and your anatomy theoretically correct.
Just some tips from a new pixel artist, what do i even know.
When I read the title side-scrolling, it reminds me of my favorite game so I just had to reply!
The thing is, when you said "side-scrolling action game' did you mean hack and slash games, like Devil May Cry and MegaMan? or did you mean 2D fighting games, such as Touhou Shinkirou(my fav game) and Tekken?
Sprites for those kinds of games are either made in a a side view or 3/4 view. Examples
1/4 view aka quarter view
1/2 view aka side view ALL STOLEN FROM TOUHOU SHINKIROU HARHARHAR
While for the tools, it depends on your own skill. Example, if you can control your mouse well, then i guess its no problem. But if you can't, the pen tablet is your friend. The programs I recommend are the ones that have layer systems, so you don't erase the parts by mistake (like in MS paint
I also recommend drawing the sketch first. After that do anything you want (in my case, I draw the outline first)
I know it's not that helpful but I do hope this (kinda helps!
I had a feeling I've been using too much colors. The thing is I'm a digital CG guy, so my palette is very very full (1500+ colors for a single piece).
Also I'm pretty confused, I saved this file as a .png at 32bpp ARGB (since saving it as a 32bpp RGB will destroy the transparency) Maybe its because of that the image compression is poor?
Anyways, I tried fixing it, now with 12 colors //god am i bad at small palettes