Hello,
I'm doing some forays into pixel art and I wanted to make a human character for an RPG. I wanted the character to be 32x32, and no more than 15 colors + transparency.
Here's what I have so far:
First of all, I'd like some critiques and pointers on this guy. I feel like there's a few things off, like for example his feet feel vaguely wrong to me but I'm not sure why (if someone's got some insight, I'd love to hear it!).
Also, does anybody have tips for drawing humans at this scale? I've done non-pixel illustration, but at this scale it feels like things are so much harder, and I want to animate this guy but with how hard it's already been just to draw him standing I'm almost dreading the thought of anything more than the simplest walk cycle.
Like what Not4MortalEyes has said, the arms are a little too short (which I see you tried to fix already) but there are a few more things that I'd like to point out.
When working with anything south of 64x64 (and often even at that scale) you will want to use higher contracting colours wherever possible. Mostly because otherwise you won't be able to see the difference of colours once zoomed out, that's why you often see people working with multiple "preview" windows when they make pixel art. So that you can get an idea of how it might look when in actual use, as it's often (especially when starting out) hard to devise how it can look when you're zoomed in real close. Often one pixel is really out of place when zoomed in and working on a sprite, but when you zoom out that one pixel works like magic to create the illusion of some intricate detail that would otherwise be impossible to convey.
The colours that you've chosen to use aren't bad but they blend together a little too much, if you break apart the colours of the pieces of your character a little more, it will be easier to define where one part starts and another ends, your palette so far is a little too saturated and close to one another. Don't worry, that's the hardest part to get a hang of honestly.
Personally when I create top down sprites, I tend to enjoy them a little closer to the top down perspective than most people, I prefer it to look like a top down sprite, where others prefer it to look like the classic zelda style of top down, where it almost looks like a platformer sprite with a slight angle on it. Anyway...
Here is a small example of what I was talking about above:
100% zoom
300% zoom
You can see, I simply copied your sprite, altered the colours a little, and already you can break the image apart, sorry it's not that complete, I quickly rushed this example for you. Also I have in the image an older sprite of mine to show a few other things.
You mentioned your feet look off, that's probably because you've merged them together, with the amount of pixels you can't really define one single darker line down the center between the two, because the pixels are odd and not even between both of the feet in the sprite, so it makes it harder to separate them from one another, which to me doesn't help the weird look of them. You can see on the slightly altered version that I've created, that I ran a two pixel wide darker line between them because of that, it looks better but too thick if you ask me.
Note that there are also some problems with my older sprite that I've included on the far right, but you can see what I mean about the perspective a little. Also see how the colours are broken up a little, way back when I animated this sprite I ran into a few issues which you will definitely come into contact with, with your current sprite. The hands and the feet overlapped often and where they are both a shade of brown, it made it harder to animate, simply using a darker line for the shade when these overlapped worked well but made it harder to animate by hand making it take more time more than anything, but I simple make them a dark shade of grey on another character and it went much faster. You don't have to alter the entire colour of any particular section like that, but when you're limited to a handful of colours then it may be best to at times. Especially when starting out as it tends to make things easier to work with early on.
It's not a bad attempt at a character sprite though, and it will take some time to get used to things, just keep playing around with the pixels and colours. Pixel art is a lot harder than it looks but with a little patience, trial and error and a little know how gained from that trial and error, you can get some wonderful things going.
I hope this helps you a little. Sorry for the rather rushed examples, it's 05:00 and I need to get some sleep. Feel free to use the sprite that I've shared in any way, including the one on the far right. I never ended up using it for anything other than a quick placeholder for some old mockup image.
Good Luck with it all, I hope you stick with it!