"I think it's perfect the way it is" is not what we do on a critique forum
. I don't mean to rag on your praise, but think harder on how this could be bettered, be brave! Sandwich critique with encouragement.
LoMastul, hi. Welcome to Pixelation. Your sprite shows a lot of good knowledge of pixel art. However there's quite a lot you could do anatomically and technically, to better it. If you don't mind, I made an edit to illustrate my critique for as you know, a picture's worth several dozens of words:
I. This is the original.
II. This whole critique started innocently enough, I just wanted to elongate the legs. So I did. Then I noticed the palette and the way your pixel clusters are shaped and I fiddled more.
III. I added more contrast on this stage but I have not yet started to mess with the colors. You had 37 or so colors on this piece. I realized you were doing 2-3 color ramps for every little accessory or detail on the sprite, kinda like
Tenshi did on his sprites, thus creating huge color redundancies and complicating your anatomy process. I could have stopped here if you don't mind large color counts but I wanted to illustrate the purpose of a unified palette: control.
IV. Here is my final edit, 23 colors out of 37 and I don't think it looks worse for it. Every accessory and item retains their identity and information is there. Anatomy is better I think, there isn't any dreaded selout to be found anywhere and I even did a few fancy color tints on the boots and elsewhere to show you what careful palette control allows for.
If there's any terms that you're unfamiliar with, please search the forums for them or ask me directly and I'll reiterate. There's a thread called "Ramblethread: Brainstorm Approaches!" in the general board too you might be interested in if you're dead-set on improvement. Even if you don't like the "Helmy way" so to speak, at least keep the lesson of palette control anyway, try not to overaccessorize your sprites and
think like a painter. Would a painter open up a whole new tube of paint just to paint three splotches worth of yellow mid-way on his painting, or would he have used forethought when selecting his initial, controlled palette? There's a reason artists far better than us don't throw every color they could on a canvas!