@ PPD: Spiky ?spider? is a neat design. Might feel more aggressive if you lift up and foreshorten the outer pair of legs (so he's posing like a boxer - tight stance).
I notice most stuff you post is pretty low res. Do you have any comment on the value of higher res stuff (disregarding whether it is pixelled or not)?
Personally I understand that condensation and simplification are skills naturally learnt from working small /low res. I usually get the impression there is some unique conceptual* benefit to working quite high res, but find it hard to say exactly what (except that it has some relation to the expansive feeling I get standing in a large uncluttered room)
* that is, a benefit that effects your thought processes, rather than technical benefits such as 'more area -> the impact of small inaccuracies is reduced'
Today, I came back to a periodic project of mine: constructing a tileset that will allow me to use Tiled to quickly throw designs and measurements together from standardized-unit-sized building blocks.
(188 unique 4x4 tiles;
Tiled makes it easy to grab chunks of tiles, so I used the 4x4 base size to construct any tile size divisible by 4 -- 4, 8, 12, 16, 20 ..)
I was planning on, once I have the base tileset, generate 16 recolored versions using DB16 palette, loading them as separate tilesets.
Just like previous iterations, the main struggle is to organize them effectively, My current thoughts (only partially carried out in the image) a) have a base 'block' size (12x12) b) include enough space on all sides to allow 8 other 12x12 blocks to be located around it, with single-tile padding, and c) any tileable patterns should be shown repeating at least once (both for visualization and easier application on large areas).