I started drawing a picture and now i need some help...... 

The camera in this scene would be looking looking out of a cave/vault into the distance,
After the scene looks ok i wanna add a silhouette dude that's looking out of the opening vault doors.

The main thing I'm stuck on is how to get the inside of the doors too even sorta look good.

PICTURE::

Here i did a quick edit of the first few
sprites.



I changed the shading around to help make it more
readable at 100% zoom.

I did a edit check it out,



Notice how the light Is hitting the Zlerk from the top right,

"But most of the time when your drawing sprites you would want the
light to come from right above the sprites head"

The light in your picture looks like it's coming from below the Zlerk
because the bottom of it is lighter then the top if it.

One way to make shading less confusing is to shade any basic shapes first.
So you would draw a sphere at the size you want the Zlerk to be then
shade it before you put it's horn or face on.

Here is a well shaded sphere.
http://www.pixeljoint.com/pixelart/34555.htm
well it's sorta a sphere.

After your Zlerk's body looks round, add the other
body parts.
If you keep the first Zlerk body you could just make it a little bigger
to make the bodies for the other Zlerk life stages.

When your choosing colors you want to have high contrast,

"contrast is when it's easy to tell the colors apart."

And also make sure that the contrast is about even going
up your color ramp.
So each color is easy to see on the previous color.

shades per COLOR......................

So i think he means THREE shades per COLOR.

So like One color has three shades.

So like Each color is made up of DARK/MIDTONE/LIGHT shades.

that's 1 2 3

1.)DARK

2.)MIDTONE

3.)LIGHT

So in one picture you could have...

Blue
  -Dark
  -Midtone
  -Light
Red
  -Dark
  -Midtone
  -Light
Grey
  -Dark
  -Midtone
  -Light

Instead of

Blue
  -black
  -Ultra dark
  -less ultra dark
  -sorta not ultra dark
  -just normal dark
  -sorta not dark
  -sort dark midtone
  -midtone
  -sorta light midtone
  -sorta lighter midtone
  -dull dark highlight
  -lighter highlight
  -highlight color
  -Mega bright
  -white
Red
  -black
  -Ultra dark
  -less ultra dark
  -sorta not ultra dark
  -just normal dark
  -sorta not dark
  -sort dark midtone
  -midtone
  -sorta light midtone
  -sorta lighter midtone
  -dull dark highlight
  -lighter highlight
  -highlight color
  -Mega bright
  -white
Grey
  -black
  -Ultra dark
  -less ultra dark
  -sorta not ultra dark
  -just normal dark
  -sorta not dark
  -sort dark midtone
  -midtone
  -sorta light midtone
  -sorta lighter midtone
  -dull dark highlight
  -lighter highlight
  -highlight color
  -Mega bright
  -white

I think the idea JosephSeraph is trying to tell you is that you would lose almost no detail
from reducing your colors to only three shades or so
per color.
of course you can do whatever you want to do with
the colors but it is a good suggestion.

and you would have to ask JosephSeraph what he/she is talking about
to know if that's what he/she means for sure.