This little concept is basically a large standing rune stone that when the player interacts with would have a screen next to it light up to show a variety of menu items in a world without actually opening the menu.

The theming is a kind of amalgamation of Norse and dark dystopian sci-fi, This is where I am having some trouble, as I'm unsure on how to make this look like a merge of stone and tech. currently, this piece looks more like a stone.. with a flat-screen slapped next to it..



if anyone has any ideas how to make this look more..singular I would appreciate it.

Okay, I've done a small mockup of the kind of environment we might have in the background and picked out some colours. it still
need s a fair amount of work but is enough to use as reference I think.

Mostly the shadings have been done as though the lighting is coming from slightly behind the tiles as then I can do foreground elements in a plain dark silhouette



I also played around a little with the characters shading but I'm still not quite happy with any of my experiments.


Addition:

I have now fleshed out the front on the pic a lot more, I'm struggling a little with the shading of the green fabric.. not sure how to make it look fabric-y in such a large area.

Okay,

so after a lot of playing around with colour palettes, proportions and styles I have to decide to first draw my self a proportional profile to get a better idea of the shape of the character I am trying to draw and how to shade the details without it appearing too cluttered

This is my attempt at a base



shading metal is proving quite difficult for such a small detailed space particularly on the arms and legs but I think I have managed something somewhat metallic looking.

after some playing around I decided a slightly different set of proportions would work better, the smaller 'cute' style was too cluttered and I feel this new taller large style gives me more room to work, I also took the opportunity to accentuate some of the more feminine character traits

I took your advice and reworked the colours a little, however, I am still limited to the 512 colours from the palette in my original post, and can only use a maximum of 15 colours so I tweaked it a bit.

I was using images I found on google of Norse Warriors clad in green cloaks and chain mail armour.  of course converting things o robotic metals affects the look, as the leather commonly sen is now a copperish coloured metal plate.

I also reworked a lot of the shading to try and improve the highlights on the metal and give a shiny look as you suggested.



It is definitely an improvement but I think it still needs work



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Edit:

I have played around a little and created an alternate head style something a bit more like a Norse helmet.. however, I'm not sure which I like better

I created this sprite today and id like some input on improving it both visually and in the characters design,
the character is meant to be a feminine robotic warrior from a somewhat dark setting,
trying to find a balance between something that looks like Norse armour and something that looks 'sci-fi-ish'

in addition, I am trying to restrict my colours to a Mega-Drive/Genesis palette
This means selecting 16 colours from a 9-bit 512 colour palette max.

All of my colours are picked from this colour reference chart I put together.
Spoiler




I was taking inspiration from Norse mythology and trying to convert ideas to a sci-fi look- however, it ended up looking more medieval than Viking.