Well, while I'm waiting for a reply, I'll just bump this with some older but decent work... no animation on these. They're my "learning curve", and part of an older project. Basically they're the most generic Beat-em-up crew I could come up with, all reeking heavily of the corniness of the early 90s and late 80s. I was heavily influenced by games like Final Fight and the Rushing Beat series for these. I made all of them by "shadowing" another sprite, rebuilding the silhouette until I was satisfied with the look, and then filling in the blanks, taking some cues from the musculature and clothes of the original sprite where applicable. Not to mention lots of fiddling with details as I stumbled blindly, with the help of FrankieSmileShow a good friend. Let's have a look.
Dirk Blazer:Reference: Slash from Brawl Brothers
Arguably the best of the bunch, this one is 30% me and 70% FrankieSmileShow, who kept helping me along the way as I learned the ropes, doing tricks like shading better, creating light sources, reshaping the legs, helping out with the chain and zipper effects, etc. He's the hero, and of course his girlfriend gets kidnapped. I planned an introduction where he'd see his girlfriend was held hostage on the news, which would cause him to punch a hole in the TV screen, kick his own door down, and bust onto the streets of Stage 1. He embodies all the "cool" attributes of this particular era, and he's sort of got a neo-Fonz look going on, if we're lenient enough to call early 90s fashion "neo".
Bigger Thugs:Reference: Al from Peace Keepers
A couple of middling sized thugs. The "kinda big" but not "the big" thug of the game. The one on the left is the first one I made mostly by myself, and it kind of shows. His left arm is totally awkwardly placed, and this is a symptom of the overall bigger problem of following the silhouette too much. Al's position is radically different from what I wanted to do, but I still was too afraid to truly change the thug shadow's shape, thus resulting in this mediocre mess and weird body shape. Another problem is the tattoo on his left arm, which looks very little like a tattoo.
The other two are recolored headswaps with a few details added to give them a little more personality. All good beat-em-ups knew to create variants of every enemy type! The one in the middle is more military, obviously, and the look of the one on the right is inspired by a famous pro wrestler(guess which). I didn't really name these guys, but I'm tempted to call the middle one "Sarge".
Harrier, Spider and BuzzReference: Mic from Final Fight 2
This is probably the one I'm proudest of. Looking at it now, I see some issues with the color palettes and his right arm, amongst others, but overall it ended up looking like I wanted it to, and isn't a slave to his reference as much as the bigger guys. These guys are the game's punching bags, cannon fodder: the lowest thugs of the games, the ones you'll see first. I wanted to give them a run-down, small guy feel.
DebbieReference: Wendy from Brawl Brothers
Her leg is wrong, amongst other things that leap out at me... The color palette needs work too. The Tough Grrl of the game, Debbie has rollerskates to move around faster and to fit her corny aerobics theme. The perm is very 80s.
KrowleyReferences: The clawed Thug from Peace Keepers and J from Final Fight
Okay I used a pretty awful basis for this guy, which is a big part what led me to reconsider my "shadowing other sprites" technique, especially since I was taking so few risks with it. I also used J as an actual reference for the ruffles in his coat. This guy was meant to be the lanky dude who's prone to throwing knives or slide-kicking you, and these dudes are usually freak-os, so I decided to give him a Crow look. His right arm and hand are messed up and the angle of his left one is awkward, a result of my poor choice of "template".
So yeah, that's my previous work. Even though I can see some of the flaws now that I've improved my pixel-fu, I'd like to hear what other problems you guys can spot, and advice for improving them.