http://www.charas-project.net/

I thought this may be helpful to some people. There is an offline version called Charas.EX on the site too, but it's not updated anymore (altough still has  a lot of choice). It allows you to make character sprites without having to draw them pixel by pixel. You select an head, body, items and clothers and can change various color parameters for every image chunks. I used it in my RPG Maker games and could even recreate sprite versions of MCOG characters (and even the parrot). You can even create monsters too.

It was designed for RPG Maker 2000/2003 usage, but the PNG files content can be used at many other places (and edited, for example, for calc usage)

Yeah it does. Some people are really good at it, though. I myself used to be good at 8x8 stuff but not at 16x16, especially grayscale. Now even in 8x8 I got some trouble too since I did not practice a lot over the years. The last real sprite work I did all myself was ROL3 in late 2003 (8x8), then Reuben Quest. In Reuben Quest there are both 8x8 and 16x16 sprites. Most 16x16 ones are rips from video games converted to 3 level grayscale. In Metroid II, the 8x8 sprites are mostly modified sprites from my old stuff