Thicker lines are only going to steal space that you won't have once you shrink it down. The point of shrinking it down isn't to end up with lines you can actually use, but to give you a nice base reference to draw over.

Also, this technique might not be usable for anything much smaller than 64x64.

I was always afraid that my thin lines would disappear when it got rescaled.

And I've always thought too that resizing a hand-drawn piece of artwork was for the purpose of a base to draw over, but it seems like EWJ's artwork scaled down is still very usable.

Here is a drawing of Jim:


And here's the same image scaled down to 46x46, the same size as the game sprite, with no editing:
vs.

I'm perplexed as to why the image scales down so nicely to a very small size. You can even make out the details on his head very easily. It looks like all you would need to do is fix some of the lines, erase stray pixels and add some shading rather than redraw the entire image on top of it.

I've tried to downsize a picture with about 8 or 16 colors, but I could never get anything this nice.

I've gathered lots of research on how the sprites were made for Earthworm Jim and although it's very simple, I cannot reproduce a similar result. Earthworm Jim was created with a technique they dubbed "Animotion", which is simply hand-drawing each frame of animation, scanning it and cleaning it up.


Source: Wormjim.ru

This technique was adapted from the earlier "Digicel" technique used in the Genesis/Mega Drive version of Aladdin to give it more of a cartoon feel than the SNES version.

Genesis/Mega Drive (Source: Spriter's Resource)


SNES/Super Famicom (Source: Spriter's Resource)


Shiny Entertainment, the creators of Earthworm Jim, produced a short promotional video for the game and how they went about creating the animations.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/zaiZva_-X9M

From this promotional video, you can see that they used a pencil and paper to draw the images, recorded them with a camera and edited the sprites with Deluxe Paint Animation. Their technique is also outlined in the out-of-print book "Behind the Scenes at Sega: The Making of a Video Game", which EWJ animation director Mike Dietz has uploaded to his blog here.


(Source: The Slappy Picture Show)

In a 2010 interview with Sega-16, Mike Dietz shed some more light about how they created the animations, stating:

Second, Dave and I, and later Andy Astor, developed a system for compressing the animation data that allowed us to fit many more frames of animation on the cartridges than most games, and also allowed us to easily stretch the characters into much larger shapes on screen than was normally allowed by conventional game engines at the time. Initially this system required an excruciatingly time consuming process of manually indexing multiple sprites per character per frame using graph paper. I handled this at first and had an amazingly complex matrix of graph paper drawings of sprites pasted all over the walls of my office. After finishing the first couple of games using this manual method we brought in Andy Astor, the biggest brained genius I ever met, and he wrote software to automate the process.

(Source: Sega-16)

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So my question is, how does one draw an image on paper for the purpose of being scanned and rescaled properly? Let me explain a little bit more, here the actual hand-drawn [cropped] image of the EWJ character Psycrow:


Source: Rocket Worm

Now here is the same image scaled down to the size of the actual sprite with no editing:
(Scaled 600%)

And here is the final sprite from the game:
(Scaled 600%)
(Source: Spriter's Resource)

As you can see, the resized image is a good representation of what the final image will look like, minus the require cleanup.

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My problem is that whenever I try to follow all the same steps, but I can't seem to get any good result when trying to resize smaller than 64px. I lose detail in my lines if my picture is drawn with just pencil or ink, but I get a very distorted image if my picture is colored in with Copic markers. Is there a step that I am missing or would it just be that my skills might just be lacking?

I can pixel right from the bat (I love to btw), but I always get a result like the SNES Aladdin when I'm aiming for something like the Genesis version. Any advice would be helpful.