Sprite Crit please?

Hi there,
I'm pretty new to spriting but I'm trying to learn. . . If anyone could give me some tips on doing hair I'd REALLY appriciate it, this character is from a novel I'm writing, my first 'real' attempt at doing a character sprite. It's largely based off a template but as I said it's a first time thing. . .
Any pixel artists out there who would kindly break this down and give me some pointers, I'd really appriciate it ;)
Thanks for looking
-Timber

It's a great start. I'd probably try and work on the hair a bit more. The colors seem a bit flat. I'm not a spriting expert though, so don't take my word for it ;). I'd wait for Scuba Steve's words of wisdom.

For starters, don't save it in a lossy format. I can see it's a png, but whatever was done to it left terrible artifacts everywhere. Upload a cleaner version.

hey this is pretty cool artwork!

Thanks for the comments and replies.
I'm painfully aware of how bad the hair looks, I'm reading some tutorials right now to improve but nothing beats practice I guess.
Steve: Sorry about that, forgot that I had downloaded the template as JPG and when I went to paste the new sprites into the template I had forgotten about deleting the artifacts. . . Doh.
The new image:
http://img154.imageshack.us/my.php?image=katsheetbeta2wy4.png

I saved and uploaded it as a BMP, I don't know why it was changed to a png O_o;

First, you have way too many colours being used. The first step I did was start with a solid coloured character and chose 3/4 colours in each range I wanted to use... I also desaturated the hues a bit, they were too vibrant. One thing to avoid when spriting is "pillow shading" the process of colouring by always drawing intermediate colours after another colour... see the third image from the left. Light doesn't make perfect gradients on things, so you always want dark to touch light in areas. The last thing was Selout (short for selective outlining). In this step you place a much darker colour on pixels in specific places like rounded edges where it would be antialiased... this way it shows up well on black and white.

I'm sorry, I'm not much of a good teacher, so much of art is merely practice. But I can tell you you will always want to start with a very small palette and avoid generic shading techniques. Also important is maintaining a unified light source. In this picture the light is directly in front of the character and just slightly high in the air. Make sure all light adheres to where you chose to place the source.

Thank you very much Steve. :D
I'll keep practicing and with your exaple there I'm gonna start fresh, see what I can come up with. Again, thank you very much for your help, this is just what I needed :)

I'm no expert on sprites, but it looks pretty solid to me. It seems to be up to the quality of what one would see in a SNES/Genesis/GBA game.

Alrighty, take 2:



I'll freely admit that I stole Steve's hair design, but it's a temporary until I can get the concepts down cold. I'd love any C&C. . . I think I did a little better on the shading but I'm sure someone with more experience can tear it down and say 'this is wrong!'

Anyway, thanks in advance. . .

Been a little bit, huh?

I'm still working on spriting, still learning and still practicing. I think I'm improving, not relying so much on a specific shading style and trying to learn a little more how to put everything in the right order as far as highlighting certain parts of the body. . . Okay on that note; Another one of my book's characters. Nicole Leandrea.
I'm still struggling with the hair but I figured I'd post this up here as is and see if someone could give me some crits on the shading or maybe point me to some good hair tutorials. This is always something I stuggle with, even in 3d modeling. . . So without further delay.

I really wanna do a full sprite sheet with her, poses for action and weapons and all this. But first I need to get the basics down :P

The concept:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v126/SirTimberWolf/Sprite%20Stuff/Copy20of20nicole.png

The sprite:

W/Coat and stuff (still very much a WIP)


The 'base'