Character sprites and the color black

[certainlynotharry]

Okay, so I've designed these fine-looking characters, (which, to be honest, is somewjhat beyong my artistic abilities) and I really don't want to redesign them. The problem, however, is that I'd like them to have a black outline, somewhat akin to Johnny Bravo or The Powerpuff Girls. I'm simply wondering if there is any way to make it so that black is not an invisible color when surrounding a character, because right now, my characters have no outline, and they are also missing eyes, (which are also black.)

Also, perhaps I'm dumb, but after overlooking the manual, I'm still unsure how to take my sprites and make them the actual characters as opposed to just objects.

Forgive my dunderheadedness.

[Scummbuddy]

Alright, first, when you import a picture, you can choose what corner pixel to use as the transparent pixel... Thats why you'll see people put like pink or purple as a background color for their pictures.  You could aslo select the "Pallete Index 0" which, hopefully you are using "convert game to high color" if its your first game.

When you have several pictures of your character, such as 7 front walks, back walks, left walks (you can mirror the image for the right view now), then you go to the View selection on the ags editor.  Then you import the frames/sprites into the corresponding loops. (front for front, back to back,and so on)  After this you go to the characters selection on the ags editor.  You could either create new character, with that button near the bottom of the new screen, or just overwrite the first character, which i would suggest.  You can go ahead and change "Full Name" if you'd like, but below that there is "Normal View"  you will change this to the new number of the view you just created.