Two heroes.

[Arghus]

Hi.
These are two hero type characters I made.
I need some critics.. Especially on the fire.
Thanks, Arghus.

[Peppermint Pig]

Character concepts are good. You use two colors that are very close together on the fire in the yellow range. From my experience, people usually draw fire darker near the trailing edges. Color of the ice is a little monochromatic and it's watery, not quite icy enough. Perhaps try a little more contrast? There's no anti aliasing to the background, so the ice and fire are very pixely. If these are sprites, then I might ditch the dithering. Are you doing any more of these, or are you focusing on refining these two?

[Arghus]

Ah, hey..
Thanks for the reply.
Well.. I was planning on doing some more of these.
And I'll fix these two gentlemen, ofcourse.
Thanks for the advice,

Arghus.

[pixelsforhire]

I'm a newb, too, so I'll go ahead and ask: why ditch dithering on sprites?

[Pawige]

I almost never use dithering on smaller pieces at all, for a couple reasons.
1st is because it takes at least a 2x2 area of dither for it to work right, and on small sprites and the like, that space is better used for adding specific details.
2nd is because dithering often looks really weird in animations.

I'd suggest adding some folds in the robes of the ice mage to replace the dithering. There are also quite a few wasted colors, that is, colors that are so close together that you can't really tell that it's not a single color. As for the fire, I would suggest doing a google image search for "fire" and learn as much as you can about how fire looks.

[Peppermint Pig]

The lightest color in fire is either going to be white, or a very bright yellow with some saturation, like in the Pixelation logo. The key to making fire pop out and seem luminous is that you have a strong contrast, vs strong saturation. But this can also depend on the subject matter/style.

Here are some fire RGB values that might be of interest. Tweak as needed.

255 255 150 Bright Yellow
255 163 76 Bright Orange
230 103 64 Darker Reddish Orange
168 54 67 A Natural Dark Red