setting up.

Okay first of all you obviously need a sprite to recolour. I usually call this the AWESOME COOL SPRITE THING. nah I'm kidding, I just call it my sprite for recolouring, but that's a mouthfull, so I'll call it sprite A for this tutorial because I'm so creative. You can find sites with sprite resources on the CREDITS page :)
First of all you take sprite A and open up a paint window. You copy the image and paste it into the image, if it has a black background don't give up. There's an alternative, right click and go to view image, then if you're using a PC (I have personally never used a Mac, so I don't know how to do this in a Mac :/) press the print screen button, it should be along the 'f1, f2...' keys. Press that and then go to the Paint window. go to EDIT > PASTE and paste the image, then crop the image by grabbing the blue squares in the corner of the canvas, see them? well drag them over until your sprite is the only thing on the canvas with no extra space. then get another blue square and pull it along to make the canvas longer, this will be for the sprite you're going to use as a pallette. For this tutorial I'll be using the Emerald version Girafarig sprite and the Emerald version Totodile sprite:

colours.

now, when you're first making your sprite, think about where you're going to put each colour. If I'm going to be making some sort of crocoraffe, I would need to think out my colours thoroughly. So I'm make a pallette for what colour replaces which. For example:

Now you should have something that looks like the above image, with the mini pallette. Now, sometimes you'll find that the sprite doesn't seem to give you all the colours you want. So You can try making some of your own. I prefer this way (: first of all, get the eyedropper/colour picker and pick your colour that you want to darken or lighten, then go to COLOURS > EDIT COLOURS > DEFINE CUSTOM COLOURS and move the arrow to the far side of the window up or down depending on the colour you're looking for. once you've found your perfect shade, click the button which says 'add to custom colours' and then click OK, add that to your pallette, repeat as needed until you have a nice amount of colours.

starting now.

This is the fun part, you finally get to recolour! but make sure you keep reading and don't just hop right in, this is an important part. A good idea when recolouring is to zoom in as far as you can. And once you've done so, take your eyedropper and begin colouring, first of all, left click in the colour you wish to make a different colour. (in this case I'd left click girafarig's yellow colour) and then right click the colour you wish to replace it with, I'd right click the blue from Totodile. Then go to the eraser tool and go to the canvas. Then hold down the right mouse button and drag it over your sprite, this will recolour one colour at a time, but it's a quick way of recolouring. This will give your sprite the colours you need.

lineart.

Now on to the sprite's lineart. This makes the sprite a whole lot better looking and alot cleaner. On the last image you may have noticed that I had icky brown lines over my sprite which were suppsed to be blue or red or such. I am going to tell you my wasy of getting rid of these, and this is a very well-known way of doing this, but this is optional, so you may or may not do this. It's better to do it though. Okay, know how you did the recolour technique? the eraser? The right click? eh? 8D Well you COULD do that, but at times it makes the lines look messy, so a good idea is to do it pixel by pixel. So remember your darkest collour? you should have got it from the lineart of your pallette sprite, but that colour will be your lineart. So what I like to do is go over the lines with the darker colour, so any blue segments would be a dark blue outline, any yellow would be a dark yellow and so on. Do this until you are completely finished the lines and you should have something that looks like this:

the result.

Now to see the result of all your hard labour. You ready? You sure? YOU SO SURE? HONSETLY SERIAL?!
Okay jesus calm down o-o;
Here's my result, yours should look a bit like this (if you followed my colour pallette and siich:

Like it? You should! Good job you made a nice recolour there! Now that you know how to recolour, I'd like to ask if you could pass your knowledge on? Awesome. Even if you're unsure it would be nice if you could recommend this tutorial to new spriters or just a friendly advertisement on your site or forum profile. I'd appreciate it.
Thank you for reading and have fun spriting <3