Hey everyone.  I found this forum not too long ago and was hoping you could give me some pointers.

A little while back, I came upon the idea that I wanted to make video games.  With little programming experience outside of business applications, and no art experience at all, I'm pretty much learning everything from scratch in any way I can.  I've made some simple card games, arkanoid, some basic top-down stuff, and even helped out doing some sprite work for a freeware project, but I still have a long way to go.  As far as the art aspect goes, I've read a great deal of forums and guides, and copied, modified or emulated what I liked and tried whipping up my own stuff when I was feeling brave.  That said, I don't have a very good grasp of perspective and form, or of color and lighting, and it takes me FOREVER to pick and poke at things to get them remotely complete and even then it's "try it until it looks right".  It's pretty much brute force trial and error.  I'm hoping much of this will come easier with time, but I also hope that you guys could help to get me on the right track in any way that you could.

A fan project that I've been toying with is a fighting game in the vein of Smash Bros., but with characters from the MOBA League of Legends.  Obviously this is ambitious (and necessarily non-commercial) but it's varied enough and complex enough to give me something to fiddle with in my free time between learning projects until I get something playable or I totally lose interest.  To that end, I've been trying to practice sprites and animations for some of the various characters.  I've posted the latest attempt at drawing Zac below. 



Is something like this a reasonable size for this kind of project?  And practical to animate, considering how many different frames I will need to make? How are the colors and, especially, how can I make the lighting/form better?

Thanks for reading my spiel, please let me know what you think!