In addition to what surt said, since his grounded foot does not slide backwards, this animation is only good for marching in-place. The grounded feet should slide backward at the same speed as the ground passes beneath him. Otherwise he will look like he is ice-skating. I like to animate a walk with a wider canvas, moving the character sideways from the beginning, and then create a treadmill animation when finished.
These look good to me, but there is one thing which jumps out: the highlights look noisy. Here I darkened the highlight color and tried to reduce the amount of single-pixel highlights. For the dirt in the middle, I removed the highlights. Maybe my edit makes the dirt look too dull, but I hope at least the brain edit is helpful.
Mind if I also nag you about that bike? For some reason I really want to see the bike where it is in your draft here. I think it adds a lot more and somehow makes me feel the depth and scale of this space, and the dude's place in it, which is a much cooler feeling than I get with the bike in its current position. I don't know enough about composition for this to mean anything, but:
A mouse would be better, but I use a laptop with only the trackpad and recommend Grafx2, too. Almost every button has a one-letter keyboard shortcut; 'd' for drawing tool, 'l' for line tool, scroll with arrow keys. Pressing F1 while hovering over a button or while viewing a menu activates the built-in help feature for that command, where you can see and remap the keyboard shortcuts.
I am here to confirm that I indeed suggested colourful laces. It was me. I felt obliged to make an edit, but really this is just utterly amazing. Beautiful work. 10/10.
My edit does one majorly important thing: removes the silly, blank, first frame. Seriously, what was up with that? I darkened your laces slightly in places, because I thought it might help with readability, but really it's much of a muchness.
The silly blank frame was a result of saving with a background layer in Grafx2. I guess I should avoid saving GIF's with layers? I like what you've done with the darkened laces, I gave it a try and I'm happy with it now:
Wow this is perfect. The only thing I'm worried about is that the scale is too large for an actual game. Once you factor in the size of the entire character. Unless you are designing 1:1 for high res which is a little crazy that you are doing pixel art for in that case. I suppose you might get away with 1:2 it's hard to tell as of yet
I agree, it is way too big. A boot this size would make the sloth of SF3:3S proportions.
My drawing and animation skills aren't up for that yet, so I'll keep this big skate for something like an inventory icon. I'm going to try to tackle the sloth sprite in 32x32 I think. I've started a sloth sprite, but I'm not happy with the proportions, the arms, the skates, the lack of chest fur, and my main worry: he is not very cute or abstractly iconic like Sonic or Mario or Quote. I guess I am worried he is a boring design?
I mean, I think the reason Deviant Art is full of sonic drawings owes something to Sonic's solid character design. He's more abstract, thus instantly recognizable and easier for kids to draw; and he has a personality.
A regular sloth's personalty might be slow and boring, but this is not a regular sloth. This is a sloth who dares to don skates. (A real sloth probably can't stand up on his own without hanging on to something, but I'll stretch it here.)
My sister and I were talking about Sonic games, of which I'm not a huge fan, and I wondered why they didn't at least choose an ironically slow animal like a sloth, which got me thinking: a sloth on roller-skates is a funny idea, and Sonic isn't the game I wish it was. Now I have a seed of an idea for a roller-skating sloth game. I am not a programmer, and I don't know how much I will want to grow this seed, but for now I am making some graphics.
Here is a roller-skate: Now that I have made it I think I'd have to be better and quicker at drawing and animating before attempting this scale, but this could be used as an icon. I am afraid of drawing the knot on the laces, but I'll give it a try and post what happens. The boot is not laced to the top, but it could be if you think that would look better.
Edit: Tried to clean it up and colored the laces at Ambivorous's suggestion.
So I tried fixing the redhead portrait and came up with this: I mostly tried implementing some of your suggestions: reducing noise, improving readability, and clustering the pixels. Would this be a step in the right direction, or is it just different?
Thanks again for your input.
I think the hair is a step in the right direction, and it is good that you removed lines in favor of shaded areas, but I think you have lost the resemblance of the first image in the process. It looks like a different person, and I actually like your original more! I hope that is not disappointing.
I like the eyes of the left image better. When zoomed out, it looks like she is looking forward and slightly up, but zooming in I can see that what I thought was the white of her eye is supposed to be a highlight, which means she is looking to her left with irises of about 4x4, where 2x2 would be a more natural size.
Her left cheek is now dark, but light seems to be coming from that side, and the opposite side of the forehead is dark.
Here's my try at making the skull more visible on different backgrounds:
I also reduced the colors; there were so many, I didn't know what to do with them!
The pro's might not like my outline because it has a broken outline on the left cheek, but that was the only way I could think to make it look right on the bright and dark background. If anyone wants to edit my edit, I would like to see it.
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