I think they are very good for being first attempts, fast improvement aswell~ thats potential ! 

Well.. I think you should give the sword sheate some contrast. It looks like he's constantantly stabbing oneself.

Harakiri!!

The arms seem a little long tough, maybe shorten them one or two pixels.
His groin should be more outstanding... hum... that comes out wrong. 
What I mean is you could try giving his belt-buckle an outline or change it's colors to increase the contrast on where the vest ends and where the pants start.

The beard seems good, but now it's merging with the vest collar. It could look like that, but it's more like a sheriff beard other than the first you made. Try changing the black pixels under his jaw.

I changed my mind about his hair though. Either you can stick to the old (shaved) design or you should fill his hair completly and give it a dark outline. When it's dithered like that it rather looks like a beanie on his head. 

I like where this is going, I'm thinking resident evil when I see your sprite. Keep it up!


EDIT: I gave him a little more butt and belly. Don't mind his hair, unless you like it. His beard however, I just removed 2 pixels of black and added some grey. I think it stands out better.

    What are you lookin' at, Punk. 

Come to think of it, his legs maybe needs some more pants. It looks like the hind legs of a dog/horse  (but that's my fault aswelll) 

Yo!

Here are the things I believe you must work on.

1. The head, he shouldn't headbang that much, try only moving it 1 or 2 pixels in a horizontal range.

2.  He's waving his arms a bit too much, aswell as the cape. Since he's running(?) he should have a more fierce movement than plain walking, but you should move his arms inwards a bit and make the cape smaller. The collar of the cape doesn't have to move that much either I believe.

3. His feet. Hmm...  Well I guess they are too big, maybe make him show less "skin". Let the cape cover it. But don't make the cape larger!

4. You forgot to draw the golden border on his cloth in 2 frames. I think it would look better if you used it all the way.

5. About the colors, I tend to like to use to many myself, but It all depends on what platform the sprites are intended for. You could try to limit your pallette before drawing, seeing as you used green, red, violet, gold and black, maybe you could get away with one of each color plus one lighter & darker version of it to shade.

6. I also think you should lower the FPS from 12 to 9 to make his movement smoother.

7. You might already use one, but references are great! I'm guessing you were influenced by this?
as you can see, one way would be to let your little guys head be still, while having his pigtail pendle.





I hope you don't mind, I tried to edit it a little.
I also changed the colordepth to 16 (4bpp).
Looking at it now I believe the collar and the cape still needs to be fixed. Also you could try removing the hands completly (cover them with the cape). Try some random stuff and see how it looks.

I hope somone else can take over from here. 



And about the Imp, it' looks cool- just add eyes! Prefferably bright yellow, red or white. That would make it look more evil 

Good luck to you. 

Ah! 

This seems to awsome, and yet I'm so very late for it.

I'm going to do one even though it's dead over the line.