Okay, just about finished with these big boy sprites. Redwing still needs some work but the other ships are good. It will take me forever to make a flapping animation at this size. The sprite is about 200x150px. Therefore, I will make it appear to be gliding by wagging the tail and making the wings quiver. Hopefully that will be sufficient, as it will only appear in a couple short scenes.
I also updated the sprites used in gameplay to appear more like a dragon. The anatomy was more like a bat than a dragon, so I modified the wings and extended the neck.
The large sprite of Thexter is done now. I just have to animate thrust from his boots. I also modified the gameplay sprite to appear more consistent with the large version.
I'm now in the process of updating every frame of the gameplay sprites to reflect these changes. That's like some 30 frames when you include the different skins for each character. One of the drawbacks of frame animation - not so easy to make changes!