With bigger I mean the overall size of the sprite but it seems doable, I think  I'm going to stick to the bigger sprites as you can see the small cat sprite you did could also be a mouse :s

The tail makes for nice idle animations, these probably need better timings: slower tail waving and more in-betweens with cat's ear shaking. I'll add somebody movement too once I fix those timings. (Cat won't be wearing the same clothings as the rabbit.)

2 Versions:

This is more exagerated

Foxes were in my aim, there'll be a good variety of different animals and yes the cat is kinda chubby that's why it has the coloured cheeks, idk about the tail tho, idk if I'll have space to put it in, I'll have to try I don't want to make it bigger just to add a tail, we'll see...

The last decision is always yours, but I would recommend you stick with what you just did : replacing the inner black pixels with a mid-grey, whatever the end size is. (I googled "pixel art common mistakes" just to check, and the first mistake in the first youtube video I found talks about that, it's apparently called "doubles")

I know about that, that's why it's so difficult to decide... Guess I'll keep the cleaner ones and come back after doing some furniture, BG and UI stuff and once I've improved enough I'll check it again to see what can be done.

Have you actually tried doing other animals? Could you show me?

I scratched most of my attempts but here I have some, the problem with the small ones is the front view it doesn't let me put as much detail, therefore, is difficult to make them distinguishable, at least in the bigger sprites I can work with more different expressions and ear shapes

The animals on the small sprites are: dog/fox, red panda and turtle.

I prefer B1 on third image!

I'll work around that concept thanks!

These are the different sprite versions I've come up while trying to find a good balance between facial expression and small size. Since I'm a total noob on pixel art I thought going small and simple was the best choice so I started animating the sprite I got, but soon after I started worrying about my ability to define different animals which such a small amount of pixels and since I come from the more traditional medium, I thought that maybe going bigger could help me because I can draw better than I can pack pixels.


I don't know how to keep improving it, guess the next step is to add colours but I would like to have a solid base first.
What's bothering me the most are these 2 pixels that are lacking outline because the whiskers are in the way.


How could I fix this?
żDo you think I'm getting somewhere?
żDo you see anything else that looks off? Please let me know, thanks.
Also if you have any idea or critique about the design and things that can work and can't please let me know.

This is the previous version in case someone want to see it:


The times are all wrong for some reason...