Thank you for the compliments. This was my starting point
http://2dwillneverdie.com/tutorial/a-basic-sprite-tutorial/. It was really helpful to get the outline done. I don't know if I liked his coloring and shading technique, but it was a good way to get a solid base base and tweak it.
Basically I just used my capture gear to get a pose I liked off DOA5U.
Then I loaded it into photoshop and traced over her outline with like a 4 or 5 pixel brush. Then I used that site's technique to get the 1 x 1 lineart.
I made her face a little more anime-like because I was having a hard time making the in game face look good at a low resolution.
Then I filled in the flat colors and used his technique to get shading, but it's kind of a confusing process. Admittedly I used Motoko from Blazblue as the reference for skin tones, because I am terrible with skin tones. For color and size I did reference BlazBlue sprites a lot.
To color the outline I locked transparent pixels on the layer settings...that way you don't draw extra, you just change the color of the line.