fusing
Fusing is the art of mixing two or more Pokemon sprites together. It's a simple concept, and with practice you can take on challenging fusions and excel. Here is a tutorial on the basic method of fusion.
First, you've got to choose which Pokemon to fuse. I'll choose two for this tutorial: Combusken and Skitty. They are very different Pokemon, but fusing them isn't as hard as it sounds!
Step One: Recoloring
You'll have to choose a base Pokemon. That is, the Pokemon that will be the base for the fusion. The other Pokemon will be the secondary Pokemon. So, the first step is to recolor your base Pokemon with the colors from your secondary Pokemon (if you don't know how to recolor, there is a tutorial here). For this specific fusion, I've got to make Combusken pink.
Step Two: Parts
For this step, look at your secondary Pokemon. Look for any defining parts (tails, ears, things like that). Crop them from that Pokemon and put them to the side. In this case, I'll take off Skitty's ears and tail.
Now's the only challenging part to fusing: take these parts, and fit them onto your base Pokemon. In this case, take Skitty's tail and ears and make them fit on Combusken. The reason I say make them fit is because fusing doesn't always come out even, so to speak. Sometimes you have to adjust outlines and shading to make parts fit on correctly. So, to add Skitty's ears to Combusken, I'm going to crop off his feathers. This means I'll have to fix the top outline of his head. Like this:
I'll now take the ears and add them to Combusken's head. Then, put the tail behind him. Do this by moving Combusken onto the tail, rather than moving the tail onto Combusken. Due to the facing of the sprite, I'll have to flip the tail horizontally. In MS Paint, do this by selecting the image and going to Image >> Flip / Rotate >> Flip Horizontal. You will also have to retouch the border under the right ear. Here's the Combusken with both parts added (feel free to zoom in and see how I pasted the parts):
Step Three: Finishing Off
Now, here comes the fairly simple part: the touch-up. This is where you zoom out and take a good look at your sprite, then change the little nit-picky spots. Sometimes, it helps to wait about an hour or so, then go back and look at it. This is like proof-reading a paper: sometimes you miss the small things, and need to go back and fix them. In this particular example, what gets my attention is the fact that the beak blends in with his face. This can be fixed by simply darkening the beak's border. After you touch up the sprite a bit, you have the final product:
