This makes me think we may be having monitor calibration troubles, which bothers me greatly. I think what you're describing as red is to me a red-brown. However, with the image on a darker background I can definitely see what you're getting at, and I've been getting some similar comments around the internet, so I'll definitely have a look into cutting down the brightness a little.

This is a weakness of mine that I'm going to have to address in a coming project. As such, time to start practising!

Tonight's effort:

Quite happy with the stone squares, less so with the grass tile. I'm not sure whether to revisit it or move on with lessons learnt which are:

• The grid is tricky to get rid of at 32x32 (something I'd forgotten after doing so much small scale work). I'll have to explore some more reliable elimination strategies.
• Drafting first is still handy - scribbling details at 4x scale and then scaling down still works wonders for getting the initial form working right
• Making "sub tiles" is a great idea for inorganic stuff. I made a few smaller chunks of stone and tweaked them in some of the larger tiles, adding moss and whatnot. This is very handy because it provides some semblance of structure as well, but does cut down variation. I should rework the lit edges at least.
• More colours help a lot at this scale - I was endeavouring onwards with my usual 3 tones but adding colours for highlights helps details pop a lot. Hi res tiles do well with a hi res palette

I'd love some criticism. What works, what doesn't, what should I bother fixing in this piece. Are there some clusters that really bug you? Are the tiles arranged stupidly? Should I get some unifying greys into the grass tile?

Edits appreciated, I'd like to get more adept at this size as I'm not as quick as I'd like to be (yes, I'll eat my words from the payment thread soon enough.) These were done in ~2 hours for what its worth, with half an hour or so wasted at the start.

I await your critique.

How can you assert your estimation so confidently without even knowing how big the tiles are? They can be done "easily" AND "as beautiful as possible?"

By assuming the worst case scenario (32x32, few recolours) and making a realistic estimation from there.

Cartoon styled tiles are excellent to work quickly on because you can block out a large chunk of the tileset in one go (say, all the tiles for a grassy area), quickly outline and two-tone shade any required forms (for our example, rocks sticking out of the ground, larger clumps of grass, some larger stone blocks and bushes, etc etc) so you can build a small mockup using all required tiles. From there it's easy to pick what forms don't work and where more variation is needed. From 1-2 hours work, you've then got a rough draft you can send to the client, and while you're waiting for feedback you can start on another part of the tileset.

The only thing that would make that take longer than a week is if he required some larger objects with various facing directions to match the tiles, or animation in some of them.

I can't work full time either (full time uni student), but I can draft ~8 original 32x32 tiles in an hour and polish them in 3, so I suppose I'm just under the 2.5/hr level. For smaller tiles (What I'm better at) I expect that count could be quite a bit higher than 2.5/hr though.

Getting feedback before you've done the hard yards (optimising those clusters, tweaking colours, etc etc) lets you cut down on wasted pixelling time a lot, so I think 1 week is reasonable for 50 tiles with some copypaste variation tiles, but because of possible revision issues I'd quote a longer time to a new client to give myself some breathing space.
If I was working with someone I had experience with (and therefore knew more accurately what they wanted) I'd give them a less lenient time frame.

It's all pretty context sensitive, but from what I've heard from DaCarterMan in a Personal Message just now I wouldn't have been too far off the mark with his requirements.

A bit more work on it. No idea if I like the clouds, or the stretched tarp, or quite a few of the details, so I kind of decided to put it down and come back in another couple of days. Crits would be awesome.

I haven't touched the colours yet.