Thanks for the feedback!
I think that's a fair criticism. I have tried to work on landscapes lately and I do move forward with baby steps. I'll experiment with different weather conditions and different degrees of visibility. I've never really pixelled this kind of sky before though, so it's a first for me. I was looking at
this piece by Dex and admiring its realism. So that's what I'm going for this time. In the future, when I'm more comfortable that I know how to draw things realistically, I will make it my aim to experiment more.
We have a different approach in this regard, I think. For example, you started with a very ambitious piece
here, as a way to practice anatomy. I prefer to practice more slowly, and I don't like to use pixel art as anatomy practice at all, because it's such a difficult medium for anatomy. So much time is spent rendering and moving the pixels around. That's why the statues aren't more acrobatic. I simply don't have the knowledge of anatomy to do anything like that picture, and the only way I could get it right would be to make the nice people at Pixelation hold my hand through the process, which I have found is not a process I like. I just feel like I end up with something that isn't really mine, if I need help every single step of the way.
I will definitely experiment with the lighting on the statues though, and give them a bit more contrast, maybe make them more interesting to look at, despite their stoic poses. And in regards to the perspective, I am entirely open to the possibility that I may have got it wrong. I kind of just did the perspective by eye, because vanishing points can be a bit tricky when you're dealing with different objects that don't follow the same axis or the same angles, and when you introduce sloping hills. The road is actually sloping upwards towards the castle on the hill, which messes with the perspective a bit.