How do I sprite faster?

Hello everybody :D Hope everyone's having a nice Saturday.

I just started making custom sprites and it is taking forever! I took like an hour to make a somewhat easy pose, trying to perfect everything well. Not sure if I'm doing it the correct way because all I did was sprite all the pixels from scratch. Is there a shortcut to this like if the body is similar can I speed the spriting process up? Thanks in advance people :D

I am pretty amateur at spriting myself (so I may not be the greatest person to be answering this question) but a tutorial that really helped me out and map everything out and made the whole spriting process easier for me was this one by Lynus. Before I saw this I was kind of blindly coloring stuff in which resulted in a mess. Although with this tutorial you still need to go pixel by pixel to sprite so I guess for the best results there is no "easier" way.
However one thing I suppose you could do is dig through your sprite sheet and find positions that match the one you want the most and copy and paste it to your pose you are working on. Again though it may not look all clean so taking your time with it in an organized fashion may be the best way to do it.
Anyway I know I am not the most qualified to help you but I hope this helped.★

Sairer said: (post #336289)

I took like an hour to make a somewhat easy pose, trying to perfect everything well.

Well crap, same to be honest.

Anyways, Flexation summarized it fairly well. In fact, I wholeheartedly agree with what he said. Understanding your current poses is you best option when it comes to customs, in addition to what Lynus' tutorial says. I don't think you should focus too hard in "speed" rather "perfection" is a higher priority. I think someone I would do, is take a chunk of the different colors in your pose that best lines up with the custom pose, body and feet position wise, and then start using that as a reference.