Dragon Maid Spriting Tutorial

I've recently gotten into the anime Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid, and I absolutely adore it! So to celebrate my new obsession, I thought I'd make some pixel art of the main characters. I didn't exactly plan it out at all, but I figured I could show my general process for anyone who might have ever wondered how us crazy pixel-pushers do our thing.

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Step 1: Heads

Our characters, by the way, are Kobayashi on the left, Tohru in the middle, and Kanna on the right.
To start, I found reference images of them online (partially pictured above), and then just opened up MS Paint. I began by simply making the background a color I knew I wasn't going to use for anything else, then zoomed in as far as I could and "sketched" rough faces in black. I worked on these 1 character at a time; I'm just showing them side-by-side for simplicity.

At this stage, it's all about getting the form "basically" right. Remember that these hard, black lines are temporary, and will look a lot softer once they've been recolored.

I'm kinda impatient, so instead of sketching the entire sprite in one go, I prefer to throw down some basic colors after I've settled on the lines. In this case, I just copied the colors straight out of the official artwork, but keep in mind that you generally shouldn't do that. I'm not sure why, but color pallets don't tend to translate down to sprites very well.

Anywho, if you look close here, you'll see that I didn't just recolor my sketch lines; I changed them here and there. (Kanna's chin, for instance.) For me at least, spriting is kind of an improv routine, so I tweak stuff on the fly if it seems necessary, or if I just get a new idea.

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Step 2: Bodies

The heads might not be done, but if I burn up too much energy on them, I'll have a much harder time roughing out the rest of it. Anywho, it was at this point that I officially decided I was going for something like a SNES look, so I made Kobayashi 32 pixels tall since that was a pretty common size back then. Notably, Tohru is only taller because of her horns, and Kanna is much too tall at this stage.

I really appreciate the plainness of Kobayashi's design and personality, as they translate easily into pixels. I daresay she reads pretty well even at this sketch stage.
Tohru was also pretty simple, but she had the fun challenge of incorporating her tail. I ended up thrusting her body forward, which looks fairly odd here, but once I add arms, it will give her a more energetic pose, as befitting her character.
Kanna, though, has a complex outfit that really doesn't read well at this scale. For her, it was a balancing act of simplifying the design without completely changing it.

And more base colors with minor edits. Not much to say here except that I realized Kanna's muted color pallet was going to give me a lot of grief. (Keep in mind, these images are 5 times larger than the actual sprites.)

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Step 3: Arms & Accessories

Kobayashi, you simple woman, I love you dearly! No, but seriously, the other two were kind of a pain. For Tohru, it was mostly just keeping her arms and pigtails separate in my own mind here. But Kanna gave me a bit of pause.

I had to shrink her down by this point, and I changed her skin outline color to better define her face and (eventually) hands. Then she has these large hair beads filling up the space to her sides. Fortunately she's kinda listless and keeps her arms down, but I worried that they would be indistinguishable from her janky dress-thing.

I was right. In the end, I just had to omit her hands completely. I also had to move her tail to keep it distinct from her hair.

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Step 4: Light and Shadow

AKA, the part where it suddenly looks good. Seriously, just look back and forth between this picture and the previous one for a minute. There's a little line tweakage, but most of the difference is just simple shading.

In this case, I just decided that they were more-or-less facing a light source, and added shadows on the opposite side. Heck, I didn't even follow that guideline strictly at all. (Like Tohru's bonnet, which is lit from above-ish instead of from the left.)
For Kanna, her outfit doesn't really afford much opportunity to shade without shading and lighting the linework itself, which I didn't want to do since I was pretty tired of staring at pixels by this point. To compensate, though, I put highlights on the left side of her hair beads.

Also, there are a few random highlight dots in their hair. They have no real rhyme or reason to their placement, aside from being more-or-less in line with each other.

And here's the final version. I made a few tweaks to the shading, and gave them shadows (a good technique for making your pixel characters look "grounded"). I also realized that my references omitted the dragon girls' hair gradients, so I looked at another reference and dyed the ends of their hair.

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Final Thoughts

These were just an impulsive tribute to a show I love, and I made some bad choices along the way:

1. I did these in a single sitting. Consequently, my eyes and brain were hurting from wrangling pixels by the time I got to Kanna.
2. I didn't really know what I was making until I was a good ways in. So, while I think these turned out mostly good, I could have done better if I had had a plan from the start.
3. I was lazy about my color choices. Again, pulling colors from official art doesn't always work so well. Kanna suffered the most here given that she has a mostly white color scheme.

Still, I had fun, and I hope you learned something useful. Here's a bonus look at the process in its actual size: