This Tip is for those spriters who don't have photoshop or some fancy graphics program. It involves re-colours and making your own sprites and/or edits. MS Paint, whilst a basic program to someone who's been trained to use it can still be pretty effective in re-colouring and creating sprites.
RECOLOURS
First off create yourself a palette of colours by double clicking on the standard colour and adjusting the tone bar several times and creating yourself one or using a ready made one. Next zoom in on say for example the hair of the character you wish to re-colour and use the colour selector tool to chose the darkest shade in the hair colour. Now move your mouse over to the darkest colour on your palette and select as the secondary colour using right-click on the mouse. Now select the eraser and hold down the right mouse button and shade over the the entire section of the hair or other object you wish to re-colour and only the darkest part will be coloured in the new colour, now repeat but with the next shade of colour up and continue until the entire area you wish re-coloured is done.
EDITING
Taking bits and pieces off of other sprites and placing them onto a new one is one of the simplest things to do using paint. Simply cut out using the cutting tool and paste it onto new sprite. However there comes an occasional time where you may just wish to darken or edit objects to place them on a new sprite. To do this, open a new paint file, paste the object in there and save the file. Then right click on the file and select MS Photo Editor a basic program for all Windows XP and above users. Using the transparency tool make the background transparent so it is easier to see the object. Select the icon that looks like a sun of sorts, this will allow you to adjust the brightness of all the colours, or simply on of the RGB (Red, Green, Blue) colours manually to do. Once done you can copy and paste onto the desired sprite and voila. Problem solved.