Here is a fast edit I made. The hair needed way more contrast, and needed more strands to make the thing less bland. The thing also needed some AA to make some angles around edges a bit smoother. This darkening to the hair fixed the problem with your eyebrows being darker than everything else.



Good luck!

Hehe, I like the Gradius reference.

But I think your piece needs a bit more work before you can call it finished. Here a few things I've noticed.

For one, the Moai needs volume. The weird light-edges-at-top thing needs a reworking. It looks like selective outlining gone wrong. If you're going to blend into a dark scenary, you need to anti-alias with darker buffer shades, not bright edges.

The shadow color is too washed out to really work, make the thing a richer purple or possibly go with a dark reddish-brown. Actually, the real problem is that bright orange. If you make it less saturated, the thing starts to look a  lot better.

If you look at most Moai heads you can't really see the eyes, because they're obscured by shadows http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Moai_Rano_raraku.jpg

Next the background, is that grasss, or rocks surrounding your Moai? I recommend adding a lighter and darker shade to better define volumes. Also, space background details. Gradius always had a heavily starry sky with planets flowing by.

Next, you need to make the Moai stand out from the background, while not clashing with it. So make him pop out from the other foreground elements

I wouldn't have realized that was the Vic Viper at all if it weren't for the title of the thread, because the view is too obscured. It's a nice silhouette but it needs something to make it more readable as a ship. If you look at the actual Graduius game sprites, the ship is still readable from underneath, because it has some volume to it. Yours looks like a flat red spiky cloud right now.
I'd probably say switching to a diving down view of the Vic Viper if you want it to be noticed.

Oh, oh, and where's the ship's blue flame trail?

EDIT: Realized a mistake for this piece. A darker purple shadow makes things worse.

EDIT 2: Made an edit to the palette and the Moai head:


EDIT 3: Doh, I didn't realize the palette was limited for this contest. FIXED.

Ahoy, it's been a long time since I last posted, but I've been looking around and trying to learn better art on the side.

A rough sketch of a sunset and some grass. Needs to be refined at the pixel level, now that the rough forms are scribbled.


A toaster man, who was eventually going to fire toast and bagels and stuff. I'm on the fence as to whether or not I'll do anything with this. I just thought it was cute. I was considering the possibility of a smaller,feeble robot being hidden underneath this toaster shell.


Some girl you had to rescue in a cheesy game with magnets and yetis! I'm considering making this character again at a larger size, to use in a game project of mine where she wouldn't be some kind of placeholder character.


I'd like a bit of C+C if possible. I would also appreciate some advice. As a person with little free time, and a low attention span, which piece do you think would benefit my pixel art learning the most? The first one is a still, but would help me learn how to refine large-scale pictures. That, or I was reconsidering remaking that general scene from a bunch of 16x16 tileset artwork. The other two could teach animation and creating interesting characters. I'm on the fence here.

I understand that currently there isn't much here, but I am just curious.

Hm, I see! Okay I guess it makes sense that a foreground objects should be brighter regardless... And shouldn't typically be darker than the sky. :/

And... yeah, no that isn't pillow shading. Eeek. I was afraid this might happen

Vierbit's edit seems to be on the right track anyways.