Search for tutorials, there is plenty of good tuts for pixel art. This site has some really good ones: http://2dwillneverdie.com/tutorial/

Practice, a lot. And draw, because it would be a mistake to believe that pixel art and drawing are tow different things. Get good a drawing, practice a lot, don't hesitate to imitate some stuff you like, you will lean a lot by imitation. Pixel art is pretty good material to de-construct, it's made a few pixels, try to understand why some sprites a so good.

And practice. A lot!

Keep up!

Silhouettes are vaguely defined, I would encourage you to try to make them more precise. The human especially looks like some separate shapes displayed one next to the other.



See how the silhouettes are very thin and well defined? You should try to approach that, every pixel counts at low resolution

As far as the Medusa is concerned, I'd say the second convey well the spirit, and is less gimmicky than the third. But i'd try with fewer, more defined snakes to convey the feeling, here it really looks like hair, and I don't think it's what you want.

Keep up!

We approach a year anniversary of inactivity in this topic, and I haven't been much active here since. What happened?

I made some stuff, games to be precise, and released a prototype of top down action-adventure-space-thingy game. Here is what the first version looked like:



Astonishingly, it wasn't good a giving people the desire to try it. So I added some art to the mix, "you don't catch flies with vinegar" or something on those lines. It looked like this:



The art is not brilliant, it was made as a requirement more than anything. There are no sprites animations. To anyone interested, here is the link to the devlog at tigsource: Click me!

After that, I started working on a top down adventure engine in game maker, which is under great progress. I remade a dwarf sprite (because of course there are dwarves) to test the engine. So here is another dwarf low resolution turnaround, with more "realistic" proportion than my old one I made for a long dead platformer project.



The old one for reference purpose:


The next project, when the engine is ready, is a short game, mainly to test the engine and see what I can do with it, and it will feature dwarves, monsters and a deep dungeon. So a lot of art will have to be done, I'll keep you in touch!

As usual, any constructive criticism is highly welcome.

3 months later....

I'm finally back on this project, determined to finish it as fast as possible. I made a new asteroid, what do you think?



The current ones, for comparison:

Really nice! Speaking of the chain, it looks like a rope, at least not like a chain. Maybe alternate tow different coloured pixels? light grey/dark grey for example.