Novice Sprite developer here.

Hey guys im a novice sprite developer. Ill be honest i use novice strongly. All ive ever done is create afew items in minecraft. but i realy wanna start doing some maplestuff.

So, with that said. Where do you guys start when creating a custom sprite / item / skill/ do you just get them off of banned story? and if i used banned story which clients am i limited to to extract sprites from to modify if i ever hope for them to be on the serveR?