hmm well i think it shows that you do in fact know what youre doing, you seem familliar and comfortable with pixels.

my first impression is 'ah neat', its kindof nice to look at for a glance, but on my eye's second looping of the image, there were some substantial anatomy issues that were uncloaked by the technique of the pixels which then turned into glaring things that my eye couldnt pull away from. 

First and fore most, the upper area of the arm on the right (doing the hand symbol), is totally out of whack, it kindof looks like one of those bugs cartoons where the muscles in the arm sags to illustrate they are less than weak. In general, the forearm should not be that much longer than the upper arm by any means, and in general the upper arm has potential to have larger girth, though i think that the width of the upper arm on the arm to the left is passable, but is dwarved a bit by the size of the respective deltoid group. The striations of muscles that run across the chest i dont believe should ever 'connect' the way they do in your sample here, which makes it look like someone sort of folded the torso in half like  a peice of paper as if intentful to fold the pectorals symetrically, leaving a large crease . one last major thing i would have a gripe with is the placement of the individual fingers on the hand to the left. while i think you got a good concept of how the hand should work, the fingers themselves look too spread out, placing that index finger more in the area of where the thumb should be located, making it look rather disjointed.

colorwise i think its pretty solid, i think the face/head is strongest all around given the diversity of hues. it would be nice to see you incorporate this teal-ish hue into the shaded regoins of the entire body to keep the ambience consistent, not to mention it being a stronger match for skintone choices rather than the famous indian reddish tones (i fall into this trap a lot too ) . one last gripe about the skintone shading is that the clefts and striations look very deep, (from using really dark shades, not much variation in line weight, and not letting the softer skin tone dominate the surface area me t hinks).

its a shame it sounds like you wont finish it, it looks like it could come out to be a strong peice. got any other WIP's hidin around here? *looks round*

edit*  by the way, welcome to the boards, i think youll find out very soon this is certainly the place for learning, and everyone is often humbled with strong criticism to help the aspiring pixel artists here, its a great place to improve!

Ive given you some of my initial feed back on this sir indigo ^_^. Dont let the naysayers tell you that it has to be done in flash, we'll get you something up and working in javascript no problem. Also, if you want to avoid the whole frame/resize issue, i would suggest you plan to have your content contained with an inline frame, so you can scroll anything necessary while preserving the border (you can even have those drop-shadows the tiles push onto the content area overlap the content with translucency if you set it up correctly.

about the art itself, not only am i looking forward to a new sprite design, but also some more organic elements within the pgae itself, more plantlife perhaps, the boxes/crates seem out of place. also the boxes as they are colored now seem a bit too plasticky and not so much wood... perhaps on the sides you could shift hues to either a cyan or a magenta... and take the 'shine' highlights off the box, perhaps add some granular pixels to give it some texture.

One last thing looking at it, while i like the arcade-like effect of the title of the page itself, i am not getting the feeling that it really matches the rest of the stylized content on your site. i think something more subtle (yet equally as colorful) is achievable to make it look a bit more artful and flow with the composition of your site a bit  better? perhaps its not necessary though.

Edit*   Ahhh sorry Tiny g. i think 'naysay' has a negative connotation i didnt intend to imply. i do agree with you that the best approach to the whole 'portfolio' idea is to keep it as simple as possible. though if you decide youd like to add a feature to your site you feel makes it stand out, i think its certainly worth a shot, even if its novel or trivial in its functionality

great great great...

ca..er.. conceit, i totally have NOT forgotten that thread btw, the three frame run cycle that fooled everyone in the world! what magic!

first off, i really enjoy and appreciate your edit and i get a much better sense of , well, the figure _Standing_ rather than squat gliding. embarrasingly (and unbelieving as you may be)... due to the sever constraints this concept was developed for, the motion would actually be cardinal, not isometric (left right and somehow up down)... which is an embarrasing admission.

i think the critique of this piece well overshot what it was originally intended for, and thats not to say that i had done anything 'on purpose', in fact i think there are a lot of good points in this that ive already considered for when the time comes that i might have to make many more of these, but regardless, im glad they were pointed out because i know for a fact, whether for this project or another, im going to, in fact, be doing much isometric character animation and these details were an awesome point of reference for me to pick up on.

Turbo, i think you are right, there is a bit too much attention to detail of the texture (which may or may not be lost, ca...damnit, conceit, depending on the monitor it is viewed from) without enough thought put into the motion... but i can tell you the intent of making it look weightless, despite the detail or number of frames in the attack anim, was intentional from the getgo.... all while trying to make it look as 'realistic' as i could get it.... meaning that this peice in particular would never expect to be anything more than 'iconic' in its practice, though ive tried to push that envelope to make it look a bit less iconic (once again this doesnt go to say that i didnt love the critique and especially the edits).

camus, turbo, thanks for the points explained with sincerity ^_^.

OH!! speaking of weightless animations... this just came to mind... and is completely off topic... anyone ever play/see atelier iris (sp) from nippon ichi? holy smokes do those guys FLOAT!

i think that these are all good and true comments that are well observed.

firstly, i certainly agree with the walk. lets say you are this big fat green thing and you weigh close to a metric ton. When one leg sloshes forward in a powerful, broad range of motion, the planting of the foot (heel first) would precede a frame that illustrates all the weight being shifted to the newly, flat, planted foot, and then for effect, an additional frame showing the leg and body slightly buckling under the weight of his own body would really complete that 'damn im a metric ton'  .  this piece was meant to be a test for functional art assets, of which the platform strictly demands "as little as possible", heheh.. so i had originally put the feet planting down at the end (though with no reverberation of weight), but being that i have to use the same previous frame to pull the leg back (no room for add'l frames), it looked awkward having him angle his ankle, then plant his foot down level with the ground, then pick his ankle back up in an angled position to bring it back under his body, so it sort of pushed me to use the 'im gliding' FFT ish solution for animation. (not that any of this excuses anything, i certainly would like to have been able to take it that far, just explaining the circumstances so it doesnt appear that i was just being lazy).

big bro: for the strike anim... id like to try that out, to take out the last blurred frame befoe the club sinks into the ground perhaps, and just make the swing 'woosh' broader perhaps.

turbo: the animation was blocked out frame by frame and then used pro motion for detail transition and motion, so there certainly wasnt any cut n pasting that i can recall to any excess that would affect, in my opinion, the motion or quality/fluidity of that motion.  However, i can certainly see that deceleration that you mention at the end of the motion, which i think is caused by the mid-arc not travelling far enough in that particular frame perhaps and the extra frame inserted to compensate before the club rests? to describe the motion i would expect, i would think that there is 1 frame for the 'cocked' position to swing, 1 'initial' movement of the arms to get the accelleration of the weapon going (this might look pretty close in position to the 'cocked' frame. perhaps there should be a more exaggerated body lead that indicates all his might is going into this ... then the blurred frame which travells most of the distance, then finally the rest frame.  given this observation id be interested to see what it looks like without that frame before the 'thud' frame.

oh just to clarify, that is in fact a shield strapped to his waist that dangles between his legs, not a loin cloth   

thanks for the comments so far