Monster Spriting for Amateurs

I'm sure we've all seen spriters like Eriance and Vader, and said something along the lines of "Oh gosh, I'd never be able to do something like that". And you're probably right. Short of hidden artistic talent, you will never be as good as somebody who really is good at that sort of thing.

But wait! That doesn't mean you have to give up. Custom sprite-sets don't need to be amazing to be good, or useful. What this is here is me, an amateur sprite artist with no real artistic talent, showing you how anybody can make sprite sets that at least get the job done without resorting to copy/paste and sprite hacking.

NOTE: You will need: Patience; time; music to help pass the time whilst spriting; MSPaint or a clear understanding of how to emulate what I'm showing in your editor of choice; A clear idea of what you want to create; A reasonable understanding of basic file organisation techniques for your OS (preferably Windows, as that's what I have); XWE, or an alternative that you can use well enough to emulate what I'll be doing there; some understanding of DECORATE and other useful lumps such as SNDINFO or DECALDEF, as I'm not going to explain how to define monsters.

For the purpose of this tutorial I will show you how I made the Spore from Virus, and other such monsters, and will note on how to make more animated monsters, such as bipeds and the like afterwards. The tutorial is split into sections to make things simpler.