The past 5 days I haven't had Internet access to post any updates. I've been particularly busy doing family/friends activities, but during that time I managed to sneak away a few times. I've made several attempts at redoing the UFO's using Aseprite and GIMP, but I'm not particularly pleased with the progress. The closest thing to something I like is this still very premature attempt (screenshot) in GIMP. Keep in mind I didn't have a mouse this whole time and was working from the trackpad of my laptop - and it's a work in progress. I'm going for a kind of industrial look. Colours will be reflected soon on other layers.

I've since bought a mouse so the progress should advance a bit more quickly. At this point I'm not particularly happy using either Aseprite or GIMP. That said I did some work in GIMP before then imported a few different sprites into Aseprite as 1 animation - it worked really well. So that's my process thought for now.