Cow

Is this a self portrait? I don't know what you look like but judging by your WIP you look human and convincingly lit if lacking a little contrast. Good stuff.

Random portrait tips; It's sometimes quite hard to recognise your own idiosyncrasies, try looking at a mirrored photo of yourself to double check relationships between elements, especially the tip of the nose & eyes. Don't be afraid to exaggerate small quirks to accentuate and heighten a likeness.

Is this intended for a particular project? It's quite big and you could probably achieve a likeness at a lower resolution if you wanted.

Tourist

Thanks for sharing ,

I don't think these are effective as smilies in themselves primarily because they spend too much real-estate looking like a girl and not enough like an expression, The natty Christmas themed smilies on the forum are also nice but not as effective as snake's skew pixel set for the same reasons.

Practising a variety of expressions is always constructive even if you don't submit these anywhere, If you enjoyed it also try doing one of those 25 essential expression sheets doing the rounds on DeviantArt et al.

Great!

Making copies of your work, trying and comparing different thing 'forking' is an excellent habit.

Structure & perspective are sound,

I went for a more iconic kind of thing and i think it came out a lot better!

Brilliant, you should be proud! keep doing this and ever more extreme and you'll be able to draw whatever you want without reliance on specific reference. 

Pixel-wise,

• Try to limit the amount of single or double pixels and group them more smoothly
• Also try digging into the very darkest parts of the tree with the trunk colour
• experiment with greens tinted towards different colours in the lights and darks.

, 

i actually got kind of inspired by seeing your edits on a few other topics on the forums; you've got a fabulous style!

This warms my heart to hear, but keep in mind that I've tried to limit my personal preferences in my edits here by conveying an idea in the roughest sense (not always successfully). What I've posted is a result of thinking logically about structure and light, the way you interpret this starting point can be wildly different and you should experiment to your own satisfaction.

Traditionally the 2nd layer should get more 'attention' than the first, and the sprites more so than that. Technically, does that just mean adding more luminance to the 2nd layer objects? Brighter colors? And how does that work with lower color counts where colors are constantly being re-purposed?

Higher contrast = higher priority, warm colours pull forward, cool recede.

Love some of the new tiles, floors especially.

Definite improvement but you could go a lot further.

I think you might be misinterpreting what I've said. Considering the scene as a whole and not a collection of disparate elements is essential to effective picture-making. If everything has the same visual priority nothing is visually interesting. I'm not trying to advocate a simpler approach but a smarter one, detail only where it counts.

Remember that rendering > detailing.

Edit - Felt I should demonstrate what a difference lighting could make. Black here being little or no detailing, white lots. I don't know how you'd go about tiling something this extreme but try applying some of these principles.