I start by drawing in pencil on paper. When I get an outline I am satisfied with, I draw over the major lines with a fine black felt-tipped pen and rub out the pencil. I then scan the image into the PC, and do some filter tricks to make it nice black lines on a pure white background. I then fiddle with it in Corel PhotoPaint - PhotoShop is wonderful for photo editing and effects, but you can't draw in it for shit. I use a little trick I worked out to add a thicker black outline to the image (I'll explain how if anyone wants to know) and then I use PhotoPaint to colour it (again, I found a really good way to do this and I will explain it if anyone cares).
Now, some tricks for shrinking the image and making a transparent GIF. First, never do the shrinking with a limited palette - make sure you have the full range of colours (24-bit RGB) enabled before resizing. Next, Do some kind of flood fill on the background, using a colour that is not used anywhere in the image. It is VITAL that you make sure anti-aliasing is turned off before you do the fill. The transparency will generally look pretty good if the tolerance of the flood fill is 60 or over, but I aim for 75 to be safe. This should not be a problem if you have made sure the black outline is nice and thick.
The next step is for Brad - when you reduce the palette so it can be saved as a GIF, try to go below 256 colours. Don't sacrifice image quality for it, but get the number of colours as low as you can. Most of mine are 32 colour, though some are more and some are less. As I recall, the fire has two, the reaper has eight, and skagg has sixty four.
Hope this has helped.
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