well from what I learned so far patience, good tools to work with remember this art was done with PTC using , gimp2, openoffice, grpshp2p,
some of the tools I used to make my art for
my game at the time!
now for smilebasic im using smile tools, red glass, gimp2, pmodem128, openoffice, my 3ds, paintnet, and others tools. but red glass seems to be best to work sprites for transparent mask. I had to change a var value to increase the zoom of image then it default, to work and make pixel art.