I know that this is a month old thread but it never got a response.
TheSubsetGamer wrote:Do you use the same program to rework already existing ships?
GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) can be used for all of your FTL sprite making needs. It can be used for splicing (taking parts from different ships and putting together in a different way) or hand-drawing them. FTL obviously had a much low-res style, which means making hulls is actually really easy when you get good at it (i.e. pixel perfect sprites). I'm not going to go too in depth, but here's a quick crash-course:
For beginners, you're gonna wanna start with splicing. A good first step is taking all the the gibs from a ship you want to parts from and cleaning them up (removing the metally bits). Alternatively, find an image with all of them someone has already made. Keep in mind: there will always be people (like me, tbh) who will say that your spliced fed ship with rebel part suck, but really if it works it works.
Here's what you need to know for gimp. When you first open gimp, its pretty intimidating, but getting used to it is worth it in the long run. When you open multiple images, they appear in tabs. You can copy and paste between tabs, thats important. Using the rectangle tool you can select and area, then do ctrl+c to copy. holding crtl+shift+alt drags it around. Make a new image, and copy-paste each gib onto your new image. ctrl+shift+n creates a new layer, which is useful but could be a bit confusing to work out. Drag around you gibs for a bit until you get something that looks removely like a ship. You'll get better at it eventually.
Even if OP doesnt end up seeing this (since it's a month late), I hope this helps someone.
And I'm no good at it. I can rework slightly something someone else did, but I could never draw my own from scratch.