How to Recolor a Sprite (Paint)

This tutorial will focus on how to recolor a sprite, including the three important tools used during this. These three tools are: Eyedropper, Pencil, and Eraser. You'll learn how to use these tools in order to take a color shades off one sprite and turn it into a pallete to then recolor the sprite.

 

One command in Paint that you'll want to keep in mind is the "undo command", which can "erase" whatever you just did on your image. It can also be referred to as the "back command". The shortcut for the command is on your keyboard you hold Cntrl and then hit Z. Remember that Paint only has a certain number of undoes available at any one point in time.

 

One thing you can try to do in order to not run out of undoes is to actually select your entire work and hold Cntrl and then hit C. This copies what you've selected. You'll then want to hold Cntrl and then hit V to paste what you just copied. Click and hold on the pasted image, move your mouse so that you can actually move the image as well. Move it somewhere out of the way so that you'll have a copy of your work in case you run into trouble.

 

Try to get into the habit of doing this for any major changes you've done. Imagine it as a type of "save point" in your work.

 

Step 1. Setting up Sprites and Getting Palletes
Gather the sprites that you want to use. You can find Pokemon sprites on Google by searching for them. Gather two of them.
 

Now you have two sprites on the same Paint window. We'll use two sprites because for this example we'll start simple by recoloring a sprite with the colors from another sprite.

 

These are the two sprites that I'll be using:


 

Now that you have your sprites it's time to get the shades of each color from the sprite that you're wanting to recolor. You'll achieve this by using the eyedropper tool: 
 

Zoom in on the sprite by holding down the cntrl button and using the mouse scroll, you'll want to zoom in as close as you can to get a better view of the sprite.

 

Once you're zoomed in take the eyedropper tool and click on a pixel that has the lightest shade on the sprite, for the color that you're wanting. In this case I'm starting with the orange on Arcanine's body. 

 


Once you have the color selected you'll want to move onto the pencil (or brush) tool. 

 

 
 

Beside or under the sprite somewhere, click on a blank space to "set" the color there for later reference. You want to do this before you start recoloring, especially when you're starting out on it. This helps keep things in order so you don't make mistakes while doing your recolor.

 

In the end you'll want yours to look something like this:

 


 

You'll notice that I did not get the shades from the stripes on Arcanine. I'm ignoring those because I rather like how those look, as well as for the fact that Altaria only has two colors on it. I could create another color for the stripes but currently I want to leave them as they are.

 

Next you want to do the same to all the colors and shades on the other sprite, which in this case is Altaria.

 




Step 2. How to Set up your Pallete
Now that we have our palletes we have the decision of which color we want to replace on Arcanine with which of Altaria's.

 

One thing to note is that Arcanine's fur has three shades whereas the orange body has four. Altaria's colors both have five shades. Not all sprites have the same amount of shades, so keep that in mind. Sometimes you'll need to use the edit colors tool to create a lighter or darker shade as you need: 


 

Now then, because there are only two colors on Arcanine and Altaria (Once again remember that I'm ignoring Arcanine's stripes, it's not that they don't exist.) we only have two ways of coloring this sprite. We can either make Arcanine's body into Altaria's wings and the fur into Altaria's body, or we can make Arcanine's body into Altaria's body and the fur into Altaria's wings.

 

The easiest way to start this is to organize your palletes into how you're going to be coloring them. I'll show you two ways you can do this.

 

Altaria wings onto Arcanine's body and Altaria's body onto Arcanine's fur:

 

  
 

Altaria's wings onto Arcanine's fur and Altaria's body onto Arcanine's body:

 

 
 

You'll see that I put the palletes both horizontal and vertical. I personally prefer to have them vertical, but there are quite a few people that want them horizontal. It's all up to your personal preference, you also don't have to have them like I do. You can make it as simple as putting a single pixel dot in a row as your pallete.

 

Step 3. Using the Eraser Tool to Recolor
You can never truly tell what a sprite will look like once you recolor something so I'm just going to experiment and try out both of the different ways of coloring this Arcanine sprite.

 

The way that you want to recolor is to use the eraser tool: 
 

Take your eyedropper tool  and left-click on the lightest shade of the color that you want to replace on your sprite. In this case I'm going to choose the lightest shade on Arcanine's fur. Again use the eyedropper tool and right click on the color that you want to replace on the sprite. For this example I'm going to pick the lightest shade on Altaria's body. 

 


 

Now you take the eraser tool and right click, dragging the eraser over Arcanine's sprite. You'll see as you do this that Paint automatically replaces color 1 with color 2.

 


 

It looks a little strange, doesn't it? But that's because you're just starting to recolor! Now move on and click on the next darkest shade on each pallete.

 



 

Simply continue in this manner until all the shades on the pallete for Arcanine has been taken care of. In this case there's only three shades on the fur so you're done quickly.

 


 

Notice something a little strange about the fur outline? It's right there on the tail and a bit in the right side. There are still red pixels on it! Those are from Arcanine's body, why are they there? Well, they're there and sometimes this happens even on the official Pokemon sprites.

 

We want to fix this don't we? So we'll take the pencil tool  and the eyedropper tool . Select the shade you were just using for Altaria, and then go in and manually click on those red pixels to replace them. You do not want to use the eraser for this unless you are absolutely certain that you won't accidentally replace the red pixels on Aranine's body. You don't to deal with this same problem later with the body, after all!

 


 

This is okay but it still looks a little strange, notice how the outline now has the same colors blocked next to each other and it ends up looking like a small glob? Let's use the undocommand to put it back to the red outline. This time we'll be eyedropping the next shade on Altaria's body and using that for the pencil.

 


 

Again, it looks a little better but to me the two shades still seem too close together. So once more I'm going to use the undo command and use the darkest shade on Altaria's body, which happens to be the next shade up. Don't just immediately skip to the darkest shade for something like this, that can make the sprite look a little too jarring depending on where you're doing this at.

 


 

It's my personal preference that this looks better. So now we've gotten the fur all changed! Now we'll move onto Arcanine's body, using the exact same techniques that we did for the fur.

 


 


 


 


 

Now for the body I ended up skipping the second to last shade on Altaria's wings, simply because it wasn't dark enough and didn't stand out for an outline. So therefore I moved onto the next shade up, which ended up looking much better.

 

Now we have our sprite fully recolored, but the biggest question you have to answer is: Does it look as good as it could?

 

You may like how the sprite turned out, but what if you reversed where the colors were? Perhaps that might end up looking better. So therefore I'm going to go ahead and switch where the colors are, starting back with the beginning sprite of Arcanine that I had. Get a new copy of that sprite to use, that way you can compare the two sprites side by side.

 

  
 

Which looks better? Personally I'd probably choose the one on the left, it shows off the shading in the fur better than the one on the right and the contrast between the white and the stripes on the body is very nice.

 

However it's all a matter of personal opinion, you may decide you like the one on the right the most! Whichever color patterns you end up choosing, make sure you choose them wisely.

 

So you've seen how to successfully recolor using another Pokemon's sprite now! Congratulations and try it out for yourself, you can even use this technique on a fusion or scratch that you've created.

 

Other Recolor Types
Robot Pokemon
Recolours can even be used to create new "types" of Pokemon, such as a robot Pokemon! We have a guide here for this type of recolor, if you're interested check it out and try it out for yourself. There are a few things within it that can require a bit of scratching, so it can be a good way to learn how to start scratching on a sprite as well.
 


 

Chocolate Pokemon
There are a type of recolor that makes a Pokemon look like a piece of chocolate, which is used by a brown pallete of color, or other types of "chocolate" such as a white pallete. We currently do not have a tutorial for this exact type of recoloring but we will have one up eventually. Once we have one I'll link it here for you.
 

Chocolate Link
 

Inverts
An invert recolor is basically where you take a Pokemon's colors and then invert them. Once you do that there are a few extra steps involved in rearranging the Pokemon's shades properly or else they'll look wrong.
 

Invert Link
 

 

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If you have another suggestion for a recolor style that should be done, please suggest it here. I'll work on suggestions along with gathering tutorials from people willing to share their own styles and then create a new tutorial for specific styles.
 

The reason why I want to make tutorials for each style is because each style has its own rules and variations, creativity abounds even in a style that is simply for Chocolate Pokemon.
 

If you have any questions please feel free to ask them!