Lord Zett, Is all that really drawn on an MSX. Great job! Nice to see all the quality art in your flickr page!
yep, all pixel art is drawn on msx and 80% of the game gfx to. the other 20% in editors as polka and p2(both special made for msx gfx)
so no tricks or ps or other things. just me a mouse or trackball and a good crt.
msx1 made with screen1 editor
Not sure if its posted before but this is a nice guide imo http://gas13.ru/v3/tutorials/sywtbapa_almighty_grass_tile.php
I found this a few years back, imho a nice read.
http://gas13.ru/v3/tutorials/sywtbapa_making_sprite.php
Back then I did this as a exercise, creating my first animated walking sprite. I dont have it anymore but mine looked something like this (but different since I just drew it by looking at it instead of tracing/copy paste):
(image from that site)
Agreed, nice tutorial, heh! 
I like how it approaches the pixel art more from the classic angle, while other tutorials have a more contemporary perspective. Some nice tips there too, like how to set up the background layer to retrace over in a light blue shade. I’ll try it out in Aseprite, though my pen-and-paper drawing skills are fairly weak as I noticed while making sketches .
I notice that none of the tutorials I’ve seen discuss a limited-colour palette like our 9-bit 512-colour MSX2 palette. I guess it was never very common, with palettes generally being either a small fixed set or full 16-bit RGB… The MSX2’s palette is somewhere inbetween VDP generations it seems to me.
Dealing with the limited RGB range poses some challenges on its own, like not being able to get the exact colour or shading that you want. It’s one of the more difficult things to deal with imo. As you can see in my Rose picture earlier, the colours are quite a bit different from the original. Because of the face being a little more yellow and the hair being a little redder, I needed an additional colour for the highlights in the hair, whereas otherwise I could’ve gotten away with sharing it I think.
Something I noted is that to make nice gradients with our palette, you usually want to +1 or -1 all three colour components, rather than reducing or increasing them more proportionally. (The same applies to fade-ins and fade-outs, btw.)
Some new character graphics:
