Nice character design! Very reminiscent of Fez.

He doesn't feel too much like a monkey to me, atm. Something that may possibly help is adding a "skin" section around the face to separate it from his blue fur. You could utilize the same colors you're using for the stomach to do so. Speaking of which, those green shades don't contrast well enough with the blue, and aren't noticeable at a smaller size.



Made a brief edit to show you what I meant. I think the pattern around the face gives him more of a monkey look.

You have (what I feel is) a couple of unnecessary colors in your palette, too. While I understand what sort of depth you were going for with the varying shades, there's a couple ways around it. Note that I removed the intermediary blue tone you were using for the tail, and went with the darker shade instead. This allows you to remove the white you were using for the right arm, and use the blue from his body instead. I feel this makes the anatomy a bit more readable, which is always a hard thing to pull off when pixeling such a small piece.

Gotten some excellent advice so far, so I don't have too much to offer. You've got a bunch of semi-transparent pixels hanging out around the sprite, may want to clean those up a bit.

Also, drug addicts aren't necessarily unhealthy or unfit. Take the movie Trainspotting as an example, the character Sick Boy is healthy enough (despite his name lol) to take on the role of a professional conman, and Begbie is your typical bar brawling madman.

Photoshop's timeline for the simplest case where there are no layers, image changes on each key frame (comments are irrelevant, I lifted the image off a tutorial)

This is a much more accurate "simplest case". You literally just open timeline view > make frames from layers, and you're done. (Bear in mind, my example is just something I had open. Not meant to be animated. )

I personally use photoshop for most of my pixel work, and haven't dived into other programs extensively due to my background with ps. I will add this to the batch of pros and cons, though: There's a lot of keybinds in photoshop, and nuances within the way it's set up (It's meant more for digital painting and photo editing than exact pixel work) that cause transparency to swap around on you sometimes. Brushes and erasers will lose their opacity (seemingly at random), and this causes your color count to go way up, as well as creating semi-transparent artifacts in your work. It's a hassle, but you can learn to keep an eye out for it.

Well, I just finished one of my first large-scale commissions, but it seems like they're going to refuse to pay me at this point. Pretty bummed out and considering never doing it again. . .

So I thought I'd ask to hear some of pixelation's horror stories with commissions gone wrong. Let's hear em!

Couple pieces for a scene that I've been messing around with. I've enjoyed the style, but I'm not too sure I've nailed it directly on the head, so any help is appreciated.

The main thing that I would like critique on is this guy, who would be the player character in the mockup. For reference, he's supposed to be a robot in a sombrero and mexican outlaw's outfit:


This is the scene for the mockup:


and an alien bartender to go behind the bar:




Let me know what you think!