I found that the making of hydorah pdf helped alot along with his tips on sprite software.
Here is the link to the Hydorah page -
Hydorah Web Site
Here is a fantastic tutorial on pixel art.
Marks Pixel Art Tutorial
Here is one more.
Pixel Art Tutorial
I use the following tools for sprite artwork.
Graphics Gale -
IconMaker - Save as png with alpha easly.
Pixothello - You can make tilesets, blood splatter effects with onion skinning etc..
Pixothello
Iconmaker
Graphics Gale
Bloodwyn
Develop games in your browser. Powerful, performant & highly capable.
I am having the same problem now that firefox updated.
The only thing that I see in firefox is an addon extension error.
"Java console incompatible with Firefox 7.01"
I will give updated my java a shot and see what happens.