How to Fuse/Splice (Paint)

This tutorial was originally made by a member called Jappio, if they create an account on here then I will link to it and let them re-create the tutorial for full credit if they would like.

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I also have some splicing video tutorials that you can look up here:

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For this tutorial you'll want to know how to recolor and shade. The detailed recoloring tutorial can be found here. We currently don't have a shading tutorial. If you're interested in helping create one, please check out the thread here.

Step 1.
In this tutorial we'll be using three different sprites to fuse, or splice as I'll be calling it. These sprites are poliwhirl, gligar, and nuzleaf. I won't be showing you all the best secrets for this because I don't want to give away all of my secrets.

For this step you'll want to think about what Pokemon you're going to be using in your splice. I've mostly found that bird Pokemon don't mix with ones that live on the ground. Some Pokemon are also just hard in general to splice at all, one example of which is Nosepass.

When you choose your sprites you have to look at the pieces that each sprite has to offer. Some sprites are better suited for having pieces put onto them and other sprites are better for taking pieces from.

Let's look at the three sprites that I've chosen.

  

After looking at each of them you see that the one that would be the best base is Poliwhirl. The other two sprites have more pieces on them that you can take and place onto Poliwhirl. For this we'll make Poliwhirl the base, and will work with that.
 
Now when working with sprites you'll want to keep them in the upper left corner of Paint so you can easily zoom in and out of Paint and it won't mess up where you're looking. When you want to zoom you hold down cntrl and scroll your mouse button.

I suggest staying zoomed in as much as possible so that you can see all of the little details. Zoom out when you want to see how the sprite looks. Sometimes something looks good while you're close but then you zoom out and realize it doesn't look as good as you thought.

Step 2.
We've decided what sprites we're going to use and even what base we'll be choosing. 

Next we can decide what parts from the other two we want to put onto Poliwhirl. The first choice is Gligar's claws. So when we take the claws off Gligar we want to use the selection tool, with the transparent selection selected.
  

Click on the selection tool and guide around one of Gligar's claws, like this. 


Then you will want to hit cntrl + c to copy the claw onto your clipboard, then paste it elsewhere on the document, like so.

Now see how we still have parts of the wing? We want to get rid of that, so we take the eraser tool, , and carefully click on the pixels that we don't want. We'll end up with a claw that looks like this:



You can change the size of the eraser to get into smaller areas. If it gets to really tiny pixels that the eraser can't get then you'll want to use the pencil, making sure the color is white so that it doesn't add in other colors and mess up your work.

Now that we have the two claws we want to get rid of Poliwhirl's current arms, so that we can actually overlap them. Therefore we take the eraser and get rid of the arms on Poliwhirl, ending up with this:


 
Now we take the selection tool and select one of Gligar's claws. Making sure the transparent selection tool is off, as it should be, we move it over onto the right side of Poliwhirl, as it's going to be the right claw. It may not look exactly right as soon as you put it on, but don't worry. Zoom out and see if it looks like it physically works with the body. If the part you're putting on looks completely anatomically wrong, don't be afraid to change where it is even if it takes several minutes.

For the other claw you'll want to select Poliwhirl and place it over the claw, because it's going to be "behind" Poliwhirl's body. If you put the claw over the body it wouldn't look right.


As you can see the left arm looks completely strange with the giant hole in Poliwhirl's side. So we'll simply go in and fill that in, like so.



Now that looks a lot better. You don't need to worry about the color of Gligar's arms and how they don't fit with Poliwhirl yet, that will come later on towards the end.

Now we want to use Nuzleaf's legs and the leaf on its head. So we'll copy Nuzleaf's legs and move them into position along with the leaf.



Now some spriters keep copies of the different versions of a sprite that we're working on. I kept a version that only had the legs on it without the leaf, which is good because I don't like where the leaf is right now. You can't see it as much as I would like.

So I'll be going back and using the copy that didn't have it. However for a normal spriter you could probably just use the back command to get rid of the leaf, or if you're able to simply use the eraser tool.

Now instead I'm going to put the leaf in front, as well as copy it onto the other side so that I have two. It makes the leaves look like some kind of funky eyebrows, in a way giving extra character to the sprite that it didn't have before.



That seems like enough to put onto the sprite. Remember, sometimes less is more. You don't want to put too many pieces onto your sprite that it just becomes a hot mess. If it starts becoming hard to figure out what's going on in a sprite it's probably time that you stop and stay with what you have.

Step 3.
Now that we have all we're going to put onto this sprite it's time to focus on the colors of the sprite, which I said we'd be putting until later. Well, that time is now.

We need to choose which colors we want to use. You don't have to use colors from the sprites that you used, you could certainly create your own pallete for the sprite. If you want to create your own pallete you'll need to know how to create them though. Once we have a tutorial for that I'll link that here.

I want to use the colors that are already on the Pokemon sprites, which are:


I personally usually take the colors from the least used sprite, rarely using the base's colors. So therefore I'll be using Gligar, we only used the claws after all. Whatever colors you choose make sure that you're happy about them, after all it's your sprite!

Here we see all the shades that are on Gligar and Poliwhirl. It doesn't always turn out that two sprites have the same number of shades, sometimes you'll have to create extra shades for your use.

With this sprite we want to change all of the light blue on Poliwhirl to the light purple of Gligar.
For a basic rundown of how to recolor on a sprite you need to use the eraser tool: 
along with the eyedropper tool: 
 
When focusing on these tools you want to pay attention to the two color pallete. 

Color 1 is the color that is used when you click the left mouse button, color 2 is what's used when you click the right mouse button. Now when you want to recolor something you use the eyedropper tool and left-click on the color that you want to color over. In this case it means the blue shades that are on Poliwhirl's body.

For color 2 you will want to use the eyedropper tool once again, except this time you will use the right mouse button when you click on Gligar's purple shades.


 
Make sure that you use the correct shades! Don't click on the darkest shade and have the lightest shade on the other or else that will completely mess up your recolor.

Now you'll want to take the eraser tool and right click, dragging the eraser over the sprite. This will replace color 1 on whatever the eraser goes over to color 2. Do this with each shade in turn, make sure you don't miss out on any of the pixels either. It will make your sprite look bad if you miss some of the body and it remains blue while the rest is purple.

In the end I decided to also color Nuzleaf's legs as Gligar's purple. However for the leaf I used my own blue shades.



Don't forget that as soon as you save your sprite you want to save it as a .png! 


 

Extra Information
Shading

Do you see anything wrong with this sprite? A simple mistake that was made?

I'll give you a hint, it's the leaves. Remember that it's incredibly important that when you take a piece from another Pokemon and rotate it in any way, shape, or form that you also need to fix the shading! So make sure that you thoroughly understand how to shade things. When we get a shading tutorial I'll link to it here, until then again you'll want to Google this very important thing.

  

Now the leaves actually look correct with the shading.

Remember all these important details when it comes to splicing, and definitely don't forget to save as .png! Good luck with your splicing efforts and I look forward to seeing what you create.

Scratching
While there will be a separate tutorial just for scratching on sprites or creating entire sprites from scratch I wanted to add this because it can be very important when you're splicing together sprites. After all sometimes you'll find that you want a part but that it doesn't entirely fit on the sprite that you have. What do you do then? Why, you manually fix the piece so it works.

An example that I have is this splice:


As you can see the fins on the splice's head aren't exactly what was on Kyogre's back. That's because the fins didn't work on the head, so I had to improvise. Instead of using the entire fin piece I erased a small portion of them and added in my own pixels so that it better fit onto Mewtwo's head. It may not look as clean as the original fins did on Kyogre but it gets the job done. It also looks better than clunkily putting the original fins onto Mewtwo's head would look like.

You'll also note that I added in a few other things onto Mewtwo, such as the bit on the forehead and the lines on the bottom. Scratching is an advanced spriting technique and something that shouldn't be tried lightly. You'll want to make sure you understand many of the basics before you move onto scratching.

Things like shading are very important when it comes to scratching, because you're making the pieces yourself or adding things in yourself you need to know how to make the shading on the pieces look as clean as the original pieces or sprite.

Texture
Something that may not be thought of as much is texture. But texture can be really important. After all it's how you tell that Dragonair has smooth scales, or that Arcanine has actual fur and not just some weird puffy things on its body.

A good example of altering the texture on a sprite is this Mudkip/Muk splice that I did.
 


A simpler splice would just be putting pieces of Mudkip onto Muk, or maybe just adding Muk's pallete onto Mudkip itself. However I went further than that and went into changing the body on Mudkip itself so that it looks like a living slime pile.

Some of the things I did was taking the fins and making them "droop" a little, almost like they were melting. I also made the mouth look more like Muk's, with a bit of dripping between the lips in the middle.

Also the texture of different purple bands across Mudkip's oozing body helped with the texture of a melting slime, something more difficult than just a normal recolor. Making sure that you thoroughly understand the original sprite's texture will help you properly put the texture onto another sprite.

Fakemon
A lot of the time splicers like to create something called Fakemon, or something that looks like it could be a new Pokemon. They achieve this by using splices to create something that looks like a new Pokemon completely, even though all they used was pieces from the original Pokemon.

This can require advanced spriting, as you want to make it almost impossible to tell what Pokemon you originally used. Of course you should never call this a true scratch sprite because no matter what you still used the original sprites to create the Fakemon, you didn't create it just by yourself.

An example of a Fakemon is this:




This type of sprite requires more advanced recoloring skills, as you'll no doubt want to use a pallete you made and didn't just take off the original sprites that you used in the splice.

Remember that you want your Fakemon to have its own character, when you think about what pallete you want to use on it make sure that it reflects that character and maybe even adds to it.

Splicing Older Sprites
Older sprites can be a different and fun challenge, because they're older they don't have the best quality. They also have their own rules to follow, such as the color palletes were more limited back then and the Pokemon themselves looked stranger and some of them don't look like what they do now.

Because of the color palletes of the sprite it can sometimes be hard to take a piece and put it onto another sprite because the pallete makes it impossible to tell what the new piece is against the rest of the sprite. It's something to keep in mind if you want to play around with these types of splices.


 

Other Game Sprites
Splicing sprites from other games can be either easy or hard, it depends on the style and how the game's sprites are designed. A lot of the time the sprites may be too different to cross-game splice, just as taking a Mario sprite and trying to splice it with a Pokemon sprite.

Pokemon sprites are nice because there are many different choices with different parts, and there are different generation sprites of the same Pokemon in different poses for extra choice. Most of them are around the same size, angle, or style so that makes it much easier when it comes to splicing.

Be careful and try to figure out the rules of another game's sprites. You'll want to make sure you remember where you got those sprites from in case you get in trouble for usi