User blog comment:VegasFox/Good Spriters?/@comment-3190872-20120102224902/@comment-1942179-20120102232938

Paint is good, but you don't use the brush. That's not how it works for spriting. You use the pencil and the bucket. The paint brush is too big and paints over everything with a single color, ruining the shading. Every pixel counts, so you would either edit it pixel by pixel with the pencil or fill in a bunch of pixels of the same color with the bucket. A combination of both is the key.