How do people make Avatars, is it simple, hard, or in the middle?
It seems very hard with the specific requests and vibrant colors.

How do they do it?

Not silly at all. Nor is avvy-designing particularly difficult for most people. Photoshop or Gimp is probably used for more of the higher-quality images though.

A fact that saddens my soul, is that a lot of people simple use pictures found on the interwebs as reference, rather than make their works from scratch. If you are indeed doing the latter though, you should start out with a sketch, if you have any sort of drawing tablet, and go from there. You outline what you want to do, then colour and polish. Super simple stuff. Though I've never had a talent for it.

I'm sure you'd find it easy yourself. I'm sure the relevant subforum has more info than you could ever find here. On second thought, it was a pretty silly question.

Well, i have my own method of making avatars. My style is ingame toris: pose the tori, make a pic, c/p into a 512x512 canvas (Best size for toribash forums is 100x100 if you don't have toriprime/vip), chose background color, filters, font, etc., Resize if restricted by forums. I use Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended.
i can make very simple avatars like this in a matter of minutes