Help with drawing character. Please.

[RetroJay]

Hi everyone. First I just want to say what a fantastic program AGS is (Like you didn`t already know that). Secondly I have made the first part of a small game for my younger brother who very much enjoyed it. I am pleased with this cos I never made a game before and AGS made it so easy.
However I want to make a better (I think the term is sprite) character.
Say I create a game of 640x480 and I want the character (or sprite) to be about half the hight of the screen do I draw (using my paint package) a character the full height of the screen and rescale it to half or just draw it the size I want and be done.
The reason I ask this is because I want to make a fairly detailed character. But when I test my game the character seems not so sharp and clear as when I drew it and the detail is somehow lost.
If anyone could give me a few pointers on drawing characters (or sprites) I would be most gratefull. The paint package I am using Is
Paintshop Pro 9.
Please forgive me as this is the first time I have ever tried to post anything into a forum and I hope I have done this right!

[Dervish]

The only recommendation i can make is check out the tutorials on the homepage.  I found the Drawing Background Tutorial by Eric to contain some great hints.

PS The drawing background tutorial by eric has a section on character art as well.

I found it very helpful

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Draw the character at his/her natural size in the background.  The easiest way to do this is to design your base character FIRST and then design the backgrounds around his dimensions, that way you can make mid-ground objects his size, foreground objects larger and background objects smaller.  If you want sprite examples you could look at curse of monkey island or runaway since they're in high resolution.

[RetroJay]

Thanks for the help guys. It sounds simple enough.
If I draw my character first and then cut it I could then create a 640x480 background and paste my character onto it as a new layer.
This would then allow me to draw my background around the character and after I was finished just remove the character layer.

[Ashen]

Jay, it sounds like your problem is pretty much sorted, but: In future, please don't post art problems in the Beginners Technical Questions forum.