It doesn't look like a Dragonite probably because of your color choice and shinyness

So it's a shiny, I guess.

I think it's really cool the way it is, and the colours are reminiscient of the old Game Boy palette.



Though it is bit more gray, I really don't see the point in changing it. As far as I can see, it's a cool reinterpretation. And its "Dragonityness" shines through clearly enough with the shape alone.

As for the how it's facing, I think it's close enough to how the sprites in the games normally look. The creators don't really make a point of them having all the right poses, anyway:



Good job, nine underline six!

So, what happened to adding a skin to the forum? I got the impression that we were close to having at least a temporary skin. And that was several weeks ago.

and off topic, but is there a way to make these hyper links shorter ( like so it just says 'click here' or something)

You could embed them into shorter words. Instead of
http://www.pinupdirectory.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Jayne-Mansfield-2-600x800.jpg
you could have
cool link

Here's the code for how to make that work:
[url=http://www.pinupdirectory.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Jayne-Mansfield-2-600x800.jpg]cool link[/url]
For clarification, the parts needed are: a "start-bracket"

[url="intended link"]
then a text or image,
and then an "end-bracket", which is always

[/url]

I like the hard edges, especially along the outer edge. I'm working on pixel techniques to get to a point where I can make game art for my own games, and hard edges help identify objects better, I'll probably use AA on backgrounds where it's okay to have things sort of meld together.

OK. You can still have some AA inside the edges though, as to make them appear less jagged.

As for the santa hat, I tried to get the rough lighting of it being fuzzy, what would be a better way to go about that?

Something like this?



Also, the lightning was inconsistent in yours, so I tried to correct that. By looking at the hat, light source appears to be in the topmost left corner. This would imply there'd be some shade on the cat's uppermost part of the face, as the hat would obscure the light from reaching there. However, in yours, that part is completely lit up.

I think the best piece is the stone tile (and I think it definitely looks more like a bunch of protruding rocks, rather than dirt), if only because the shape is defined and clean.

The rest of your art - though clearly having been paid more attention to - is very dirty and full of noise most of the time. For example the cave wall, and the rock above it, have a heavy amount of unneeded dithering on them. This makes them quite hard to read; their shapes blurried. And there's no apparent reason why there should be any stray pixels on that santa hat. They seem completely arbitrary, and don't help the piece in any way.

Hard edges and jaggies are present in every piece, and in need of being cleaned up and smoothened with AA.

Despite all the criticisms above, I also think this is a pretty good start. All that I'm requesting is readability. Keep going!