Thank you so much! I've put a lot of love and effort into spriting the characters. I still need to make Ultra Violet and Kontrast but I'm happy you like it!
The form themselves are a combination of a drawing and a 3D model of them, the body form helped a bunch with the reference. Also, using GIMP helped with rotations of the arms.
It's at points where I wish the forum allows for CSS edits, I would spice my sig up with a snazzy background while they're animating. Unfortunately, if I want to do that, I have to make sure all sprite animations perfectly sync up and that'll be a pain to do.
GIMP is basically free Photoshop. CSS is pretty much layout edits for the website, like changing the color of the background of the forum. Some forum sites allow users to personalize their post layout, though a drawback that people can poorly format their posts and mods will have to step in and disable their layout if it's bad enough.
GIMP allows you to animate your sprites yes. What you do is that you piece individual images together through its layers, and export it as a gif animation. An option will come up, and you need to check layer disposal for each frame and have all frames do the same time lapse. And finally, upload them to imgur, and you can then link them.
And, I think I may know what to do for a background: piece the background together with each Protector sprite image, and make it seamless between them. I'm going to attempt something like that. First I actually need to draw a background.
Testing this image so that there's no gaps between sprites, so it should allow for tiling horizontally....
...apparently not, saving the post creates a gap. Oh well, there goes the idea of creating seamless backgrounds...
...testing again, appears to have no gaps. I'll attempt a version with a background!
CSS is just web design in general. I honestly don't know too much about it, but I did made a pretty neat post-layout in one forum. Acclmboards is one forum software that allows post layout edits through CSS.
Making two of these characters takes around 4 hours total, I did them in pairs, but it doesn't take into account the sketch of them I had already nor their 3D assets I rendered but I suppose I could work without their 3D assets since it's not necessary, though it did help with pose and lighting. Animation was its own thing.
I don't think it would be a pain to put them in a background. I just have to draw the background, fragment them, and piece them together with the Protectors inside them, so it gives off the illusion of a seamless background.