Is it hard to make portraits?

So I’ve been searching for a while now for a portrait of Beowulf from FE4, but I can’t find any anywhere, I just started with FEbuilder and want to make some changes to an FE8 rom which would include having Beowulf as a character instead of Seth, if nothing else I would make a portrait but I am not sure where to begin with and YouTube tutorials sound just like Chinese, like I don’t get how I can find a base image to edit it, for example. Can anyone help me with this regard?

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One place to start can be TheFlyingMinotaur’s Character creator. It was where I started. Visual art has never been my thing, but it allowed me to get started. You can always then use the resources it provides to manually splice/edit things.

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Hmm, I was hoping to have a way to edit a Beowulf portrait. I see there are portraits of other FE4 units, like 4 Holyn’s, that’s stupid xD Why not Beowulf? :frowning:
Do you maybe know how I can get a Beowulf portrait?

Honestly, making portraits is kinda difficult. But, it is doable. If you want a portrait of such/such that doesn’t quite exist yet, you can try and custom one yourself. However, I would not jump to customing as a first foray into spriting. Try out character creator to get an idea of the fitting of of pieces, then try splicing portraits. If you get good enough, you can start with small changes, like new clothes, and eventually get to full customs. If you need help, you can always ask the forums or the discord.

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I see, well thanks a bunch for the replies

Hello, like @TheCoolerTimeley requested, I do not recommend making fully custom sprites at first because it can be very overwhelming as to where to begin. However, you can always ask for help. This is why I made this Beowulf portrait, it is free to use and free to edit, normally you can use it right away functionally in FEBuilder even though I haven’t tried it out myself yet. I hope you will like it. The second one is with the 16 colours I used if you ever want to make adjustments.
BeowolfBeowolf 4

I took a few liberties to its armour because it wasn’t very consistent with how it was represented during my research, so here are the references I used:
Beo

If you are curious about what I used to make it, I used Innes for the hair and its face’s upper half, Caellach for its face’s lower half and the collar, Beran for the scarf and lastly Duessel for the armour. So it might not be fully accurate to his FE4’s incarnation but rather a GBA interpretation of his design.

On another note, if you ever want to make other portraits, I will give you a shortlist of easy to use tools to start efficiently.

Just like @Zebbmann wrote, I suggest starting with TheFlyingMinotaur’s Character creator, it contains almost every vanilla GBA sprite (for instance Caellach isn’t on there) and will likely help you with splicing and gain a lot of time if you just wanted to see what a character mash-up might end like. However, the sprite you will have in the end will be twice as big as a classic GBA face sprite so you will have to reduce its size by 50% both in length and width.

A cool tool that can be used instead of or in a complementary way with Paint. I often use it to verify the number of colours I used and adjust them if they differ by not much. I believe it has been changed but you could only use 16 colours maximum including the background (so 15 concretely) per sprite to be functional in your software such as FEBuilder, so I recommend being aware of the colours you are using.

A neat resource made by @Klokinator that contains most of the work made by the community that I believe is entirely free to use (need to check on that notion), including tons of sprites, animations and much more.

I advise seeing this post as well, it might help you: FE Portraits - Projects / Concepts - Fire Emblem Universe (feuniverse.us)

Please, feel free to ask me anything if you have any questions, whether it be there or on Discord. Have a wonderful day. :slight_smile:

EDIT: The portrait wasn’t compatible in FEBuilder, I tried it, my apologies, I remade it, please, check my latest answer.

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Suprisingly, not much. It’s just practice.

Omg, thanks a bunch, just what I was looking for @Matthieu, I definitely need practice with these. But for the little thing I’m making right now I just really needed Beowulf specifically so thanks a bunch!

Have you drawn anime faces before? Have you done pixel art before? Are you good at either of these things? Each of these significantly deceases the difficulty threshold and from there it’s observing how GBAFE portraits are stylized.

Beowolf

Really sorry, I realised just now, I put the portrait on FEBuilder but the eyes/mouth frames weren’t fitting, and a part of his hair was out of the authorized zone, so I had to rework it slightly. I’m really sorry, realising this mistake, just now, half a year after I sent the message. I hope you didn’t have any issues when trying to implement the portrait in the engine, if so, you should have contacted me, to fix the issue. Once again, I’m sorry.

Omg man, don’t even worry about, I saw the issue, but it is not like it was big and gamebreaking, my portrait making/editing skills are still 0 since then, but I built a fun little “hack” a small youtubers community and he had fun playing it with Beowulf also being present in all his glory.
I am still however really grateful for this, you are a really nice guy thanks you very much!

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Great, I’m glad you were able to enjoy it despite its flaws. Well, I am quite embarrassed, I don’t think it deserves that much praise but still, you’re welcome and if you ever need something else, please don’t hesitate to ask me. Have a nice day! :slight_smile:

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