I was going to make a longer post, because the hair was the biggest thing I had a problem with, and I don't seem to be the only one. But you seem pretty angry and reluctant about it, for some reason. That's not to say the hair's the only problem. My main concerns are with banding. There's a heck of a lot of it, compared to the original sprites, and it surely can't be healthy. Edit coming soon, if I can just figure out where that dang light-source is. (Overhead, I presume?)

I'm going to quit talking about the hair now. I'm afraid to see what happens if I keep going...

Why is the first thing I think of GTA IV? 

Anyway, the model itself is cute. I think it's the texturing that needs work. Try to define your light-source and make planes closer to that light-source, you know, lighter. Assuming this car has a metal shell like any normal car, consider adding some edge highlights as well. It should help define sharp corners. And for some reason, it looks like you saved the texture as a JPEG, unless all that noise is intentional.

Excuse me for tossing all this terminology around, I tend to do that.

Thanks, no he doesn't mine anything sorry, but he is investigating the disapearence of Dr. Freeman. There should be some really strange stuff going on since the theme for the competition in Nine Times were gonna have Nine versions of your dude.

Oh. Hmm. Is he underground, then? If not, I don't think he needs a lightbulb on his helmet, unless it's going to be dark where he is. There should be a decent explanation for everything on and about your character. Also, depending on the setting altering the palette would change, slightly. Mostly for atmospheric effect. Just a thing to consider.

The tile looks nice, by the way, but those marks--I'm thinking they're craters/imperfections in the rock surface--don't really look like craters at all. Somewhat ill-defined, they don't seem to be affected by the light-source much. However I'm probably not going to make an edit. Why?

Good question. Probably a mix of laziness and inexperience, but I'll try.

I suggest getting rid of the outlines and just have flat color and shade

Agreed. Sprites at this size, and of this manner, are way too small for outlines. Try to define the main shapes and details of your sprite with "clusters", or basically, don't use outlines.

There's another big mistake you're making here. Huge mistake, in fact--never save your pixel art as JPEG. Save it as PNG instead. Saving as JPEG adds dozens of unneeded colors and makes the whole thing uglier.

...Also, is that some sort of mask he's wearing?

Wait, Cure. I think she's asking more about how we got interested in pixel art and how we developed, progressed and improved over time. In other words our "Pixel" story. Posting our oldest pixel art could only be a part of it.

Mine's relatively short compared to some of yours (but a lot of things happened in that short time span). Regardless I'll try to keep the length appropriate (hopefully)--often when I do things like this it turns into a full-length autobiography. In case that happens I'll tone down the font size.

I think I started around '05 or '06. I was a huge fan of DeviantArt back then, namely the art that I (and probably many of you) now see could have been improved heaps. All I did was praise and admire through a series of praising, admiring comments. Frankly I wasn't much of a typist back then.

One artist I praised and admired in particular was a guy called Bleedman. I wasn't the only one, though. Read through all his comics, subscribed, commented, messaged, everything. Hell, I even made about five pieces of fanart. I still have my account up, but it hasn't been touched for years--I think I put my oldest pixels over there, and I'd rummage through everything I had and reflect on it had it not been for the fact that I'm now too lazy to find my account information.

Eventually, somewhere about a few months I thought I might start doing something myself. First thing on that list was the aforementioned fanart. Then I started pixelling, mostly terrible fan sprites of several Sonic the Hedgehog fan-characters, one of which I remember was a purple rabbit. I can already remember the sheer amount of pillow-shading on every single one of those things. That's when I got interested in "improving". One among a chain of mistakes I made following that period was hunting down all the tutorials I could find and abiding by all their rules. Unfortunately most of them were bad ones. This was back in the day when a lot of pixellers, or at least those I was around, were still pillow-shading, including me.

This went on for half a year or something. Nothing too special in the first half of 2007, really. Eventually I found a new fandom, that being NiGHTS into Dreams, so that was the subject of a lot of my pixels and art. When the new Wii game came out I was for some reason elated. Only problem, I didn't have a Wii, but it made me almost forget about my past fandom, and it sparked an increase in my pixelling productivity.

I wish I could show you, but shortly after that, everything on that computer died.

The next thing I remember being significant was a movie called 9... Oh boy. Up to this point I wasn't really too interested in the "art" part of fanart; rather, the "fan" aspect. That changed when I saw the trailer for that movie. I don't know what made me say, "Ragdolls running around in a post-apocalyptic environment? Sweet!" but I did. I certainly have drawings of the movie's characters laying around. It was the first thing I really wanted to draw properly. I suppose I'd get more attention that way. So what did I do? Practice. But mostly tutorials. I did that until I thought I drew things like that perfectly. The next step was to show it off to people who might like it. After joining a forum and realizing the community’s presumably caffeine-fueled, chock-full-of-emoticons energy was starting to cling to me, frankly, I thought I'd be better off leaving and keeping that fandom to myself. From time to time, though, I still look back at the regrettable things I did.

Either before or after that fiasco, I discovered the haven that is Pixelation--before that, PixelJoint, but for some reason this site caught my interest more. That was when I realized that those ragdolls were the only thing I knew how to draw properly. That I wasn't taking art very seriously, really. Pixelling had become one of my hobbies over time. Well, here I am now, 5 "fandoms" later and still going. I still consider myself something of a beginner even to this day. I know I still have a lot to learn (like don't turn posts into autobiographies) and hope this forum, and maybe that ConceptArt place if I join, will help me along the way.

One heck of a wall of text, ain't it? Pixel art is coming when I find it. The oldest one I have now is actually somewhat recent, and my most recent ones are mostly edits.

In fact I don't think any of my older ones on here are actually pixels. Closest thing I have + oldest and closest thing to a pixel (silly 9 fan-art):



Recent-est (unfinished):