Best Drawing program to make sprites?

[stefcep2]

Briiliance does everything that DPaint did, right down to the keyboard short cuts.  It uses a "paintbox" interface instead of menus.  It feels faster to work with this way especially if working with more than 64 colors.  Problem is you then need to learn a new interfcae if you already know your way around Dpaint.

From my experience versions after Dpaint 4 AGA were slower for even basic operations and there wasn't a lot of new features that would be relevant for sprite design.  So I still use DPaint 4 AGA because I'm more familiar with Dpaints animation menus and functions.

[stefcep2]

@stefcep2:
 
Just to clarify, when you say Brilliance does everything DPaint V did right down to the keyboard shortcuts, does that also mean animation?

I haven't found anything that Dpaint could do with animating that Brilliance couldn't.  They just use a different interface to achieve the same result.  brilliance also seems to load anims faster too.

And when working in interlaced modes, for some reason  there seems to be less interlace flicker, especially in NTSC high-res laced with Brilliance, probably because of the interface color scheme.

edit. regarding different image format support like jpegs and gif, PPAint has native support but i have a utility called datachrome that sits in the background and uses dtatypes to load jpegs and gifs transparently as IFF's into DPaint and Brilliance.

Like someone said try them all and see for yourself, altough PPAint has the weakest animation support, although it can save anims as anim-gifs.

[stefcep2]

Well, Brilliance doesn't do onion-skinning.  If it did then I'd probably use it exclusively, because it is great.

Never realised that!

[stefcep2]

What is Onion skinning?

Animations consist of several frames.  Traditional animators used to work on transparent sheets, each frame was on one sheet, and to test that the relative positioning of the moving components looked right they would overlay one or more sheets in the order they would need to be to create the illusion of motion.  Onion skinning means that you can see a faint outline of the previous or next frame on top of the current frame you are working on. This is the same concept digitally as what traditional animators did.