What, did you think I was going to have a consistent theme to my Chosts?
I'm schizophrenic AND ADHD! The only way my train of thought could derail more often is if I was on the autism spectrum too. Christ, I pretend to be a bear on Twitch.
Sprite editors, pixel artists, if you're going to use an art style as a major influence or even edit sprites from a video game, which are both ENTIRELY VALID
Remember the ages of the characters involved. Not for weird anti-horny reasons or puritanical reasons, christ, don't look at me like that. It's because if you're editing a sprite of a character and not making your own sprite, your character is going to come out looking like that one, naturally.
A really big example of this is that old Sprite comics tended to edit sprites of Mega Man characters. Particularly... well, Mega Man and Bass, given that they had the largest sprite sheets out of most of the characters. Bass, because of his funky and bulky armor and slightly older appearance... this was more easily hidden with him, but with Mega Man...
Mega Man is a small boy. Anywhere from "Astro Boy" to 10 years old in appearance. This is a lot more noticeably in Mega Man 8's cutscenes than any of the 8 and 16 bit games, but it made a lot of people's "Tough Badass" OCs look like ten year olds because they were edited from Megaman/Rockman.
so yeah. Keep track of the appearance and art style you're editing, but also remember: Editing sprites as a learning experience or just for fun is valid as fuck and none of this is shaming anyone, just reminiscing about the Early Internet and Sprite Comics, with a word of advice from someone who braved those trenches.