So as part of the game, I decided the main character should be a narwhal.  Who doesn’t love a narwhal?  Certainly my kids do.  Not being an artist I wasn’t sure how to do this.  I Googled “narwhal”, found some images, and tried to replicate in Inkscape.  Since the character should be animated, I decided to just move the tail up and down (swimming).  Since I’d also be angling the sprite up and down as it progressed, I figured this would suffice for the impression of motion.

I created the narwhal, and drew the tail as a squished ellipse.  I then played with the path (Inkscape is a great tool!), so I could turn it from something basically straight into a fat boomerang.  I created 5 images (up, down, straight, 2 in between – yea flip horizontal!).  I played around until I was able to export it and get decent “8-bit” looking resolution from Gimp, then put it all into a sprite sheet with Imagemagick.  Since I don’t want to embed the animation library here, I’ve put an animated .gif version of the narwhal below (click to play the animation):

Only after I incorporated into the game and looked again did I realized I created an animated turd, skewered by a white crayon.  Since the rectangular bounding box is a pain with this shape (you either “collide” when you’re above the horn, or I exclude the horn), I think I’ll just start over.