This is a pretty efficient way of making simple sprites.
It will come in mighty handy!
Here's a 7 minute example of a cannon.
Basically what you do is draw what you want to make (guns work the best I find) and draw it, if you want lots of detail, make it BIGGER, the downfall to bigger is that the smaller details will be cancelled out for the more prominent details, but you can fix this in the polishing moment I shall mention later. If it's just a simple little pistol or something, then it doesn't really matter what size you draw it to start with. Now, when you polish it up, refer to your BIG drawing (or small, whatever size you have) and draw in all the cancelled out details, put in shading if you did not before, along with highlights, etc., and after an appropriate amount of tweaking, you have a pretty good sprite for not alot of effort.
NOTE: I will expand on this when I don't have a summative due...
) with your program, then saving it as a new file,