ASE (Allegro Sprite Editor) is a program specially designed with facilities to create animated sprites that can be used in some video game. It lets you create from static images, to characters with movement, textures, patterns, backgrounds, logos, color palettes, and any other thing that you think.
Features:
Edit sprites with layers and frames (see Sprite in the wiki).
Edit RGBA, Grayscale and Indexed images (256 color palettes).
Load/save sprites in these formats: .GIF, .FLC, .FLI, .PNG, .BMP, .PCX, .TGA, .JPG, and .ASE
Load/save animations in sequence of bitmaps (frm00.pcx, frm01.pcx, ...).
Tiled drawing mode to draw patterns and textures.
Undo/Redo support for every operation.
Special tools like Blur, Jumble, Convolution Matrices.