I used to play around with RPG Maker when I was around 14, 15 years old, and there was a pretty nice software to create custom charsets (the "actors" sprites) called Charas.ex.
It is still available around the web, but its sprite format is quite obsolete, only 3 frames per animation and kinda small (24x32) sprites. I looked around for newer versions, but they were all buggy and limited to the default sprites of the new versions of RPG Maker.
So I decided to propose a collaborative project to the coolest and nicest game engine community I ever knew: you

I made a simple application-thing (using Löve) to create sprites in a similar way as Charas.ex, overlaying separate sprites for clothes, hair, body, acessories and so. I made this in a few hours, and I kinda suck at coding too, so there is room for a LOT of improvements (things like color sliders would be very, very cool), but the most important part is the sprite database.
I would like to see it grow, so I (and other people around here and all over the internet) could use them to create semi-original graphics without having to draw everything from scratch.
I used 32x32 sprites with 4 different states (up, down, left and right) and 8 frames of animation for each state.
I haven't implemented a way to save your files because I'm using love 0.7.2 and the only format it supports is BMP (which sucks), but it's possible to take a screenshot of the complete spritesheet and edit it using other software.
Well, here it goes.
Use the arrow keys to navigate, the horizontal arrows change the "set" and the vertical arrows change the particular item used.
EDIT: Forgot the most important: to add sprites to the database, just paste them in the corresponding folder, under "gfx"
EDIT 2: also, don't feel constrained by the base model I created. It sucks. It would be nice to have a 'standardized' character model so all the sprites would fit one another, but the one I made is terrible.