I am a developer not artist (though I do try), and I have a friend who wants to make some sprite art for me. He asks : What is the best program to use for sprite art? Thanks.

I prefer Paint, Gimp isn't bad, Graphics Gale is like Paint but a little better (I'm just not use to the interface.) Eitherway it doesn't mater. All you need to make a sprite is the pencil tool and a color pallete ;)

Mspaint is a decent program for drawing small sprites. The biggest problem I have with it though is that it gets clunky if you want to draw with many different colors. I tried Gimp, but I found it less than optimal for drawing small 32x32 or 16x16 sprites. If your sprites are large then it might be a good program, but it really didn't seem to be designed for pixel by pixel drawing, at least when I used it.

Personally, I use Tilestudio( http://tilestudio.sourceforge.net/ ), and like it very much. It's designed to draw tiles and not large images, so the features are all centered around what it sounds like you want to do. Switching between many colors is (I find at least) much much easier than with paint. Additionally, it has some very nice features, specifically the ability to lighten and darken pixels and a blur tool. The darken and lighten tool isn't always going to give you good looking ranges for nice shading (I've found it tends to darken or lighten too much for this use), but when used in tandem with the blur tool you can make some nice looking and very quick shading jobs. Even just outlining your sprite in black and blurring its body will often give you a decent pillow shade. Not a way to make excellent sprites, but for an unexperienced artist who wants to pump out the sprites it might be a big help. Admittedly, the features I mentioned aren't unusual in image editing software, but if your thinking of using just mspaint they're certainly a step up. And significantly, the program is free :)