So I'm very new to pixel art. I've looked at a course or two on Udemy and I've been fiddling around with background tiles for a while (the usual: grass, rocks, that kind of thing).

I felt like I was making some headway, so thought I'd have a go at some character animation.

This is my first attempt at a spaceman. He's small as I want the pixels to look chunky in the final game. This cycle contains run, jump and idle. The animation frames were inspired by the walk and jump cycles in a Preston Blair book on cartoon animation (you can find the cycle images all over Google as well.)



This is an earlier iteration without shading, and just the run cycle.



So questions:

 - It all looks very simplistic, and the shading seems uneven between the head and the body. How can I better shade the character to be more space-suit-like? (I'd like to keep a slight orange tint to the player, as the majority of the environment will have an orange hue.)

 - The game concept involves the suit sometimes being empty, controlled remotely by an AI (in game of course. In reality the player is always in control.) In this case, a "breathing" style idle animation doesn't really make sense. What else could I use for an idle animation to add interest? Breathing seems to be so ubiquitous.

 - I'm not overly happy with the "Jet Set Willy" style side-on idle. What kind of poses are there that aren't the "overly dramatic 45 degree to the camera posed" look?