Many of us are, nicely put, artistically challenged. One of the most difficult things then is coming up with character sprites. Fortunately there are options, even for those with zero artistic talent.
we create this animation:
in about 15 minutes.
The majority of the heavy lifting is done by Mixamo, both using Fuse for character creation then Mixamo for animation (free) and rigging. Then Blender is used to render the sprite sheet and TexturePacker is used to assemble it into a sheet. You can download all of the
resources mentioned above here. If you want to learn a bit more about Fuse,
watch this.
Just be aware, all of the above software have free versions available, but for real world use, you will eventually have to spend money. Fuse is available for about $100 which includes 2 free rigs a week, while the complete version of texture packer is available for about $50. Additional animations are also available for around $15 a piece. That said, compared to hiring an animator, that's still dirt cheap.