Rather then going from just dark to light add yellow as you get lighter (highlights), also add blue/magenta as you get darker (shaded), this is known as hue shifts as oppose to straight luminosity shifts

tried to apply your suggestion and get an alternate raster to build trunks, and just in the last minute, i realised i used red shadows rather than blue purple shadows (with three alternative rasters at varying saturation) ...

They'll hopefully get more convenient for trees than the good'ol Tyrian palette i'm stealing so far. Thanks for the tip.

English isn't his first language

#true, though i have quite good level to discuss (computer-science) technical issues. However, all that colour/shape/drawing vocabulary is new to me ... and i don't get at all the meaning of sentences like "Don't cop out on this like that" 

(picked both in an editor to see how you got from 'before' to 'after' ... well, you just edited the whole thing. much to be learned here  )
just one thing that feels odd with your edit, Fool, is the thinner sub-roots on the right. That seems just too far from the ground to appear in my knowledge of trees.

But well, that's completely smashing me, so i guess i should better shut up and envy quietly 

Well, honnestly, guys, there's really nothing to get arguing about here.

I need advices to progress, that's certainly a fact. You gave pretty good ones, and i'm grown up enough to take critics the way they are, even if they are as rude as "less interesting than kirby". I'm not doing pixel art "like this" for 10 years, fortunately. I'm just getting back at "pixel drawing" after 10 years, and i'm sure amazed at what you guys manage to do with e.g. Arne's palette.

I don't have such skillz yet, and i'm doing both the code and the gfx on this project, meaning that if i later find someone that's doing better art than myself, everything you see might become "concept art" rather than "ingame art"
I just wish people had given crits over the complete character (e.g. the ball with hands and feet), but it's my bad to have posted straight screen capture rather than game mockup, so i can't complaint.

I'll get back to work now, try to integrate your remarks, work on better animation and palette manipulation tools, add rayman-like animation to the main character, and come back when i'll consider to have any improvement.

Quote

something is still looking weird in the palmtrees' tops, imho.
as if shading and general shape of the leaves had no relationshipˇ

hm, if you have to make a critic..maby you should have something important to say about it and explain why and come with a conclusion?

Well, sorry, it seems i just didn't made myself clear enough. I'm really trying to help with my 2 cents, you know.

Anyway, seeing the very top of the tree that dark makes little sense to me, and the fact that all leaves "high-reflection" areas appear in circle doesn't match with what i intuitively expect given the shape of a palmtree's leave.
That being said, i suck at drawing palmtrees, so i can't suggest a better way to go, unfortunately, except pointing at some Donkey Kong Country snapshots

very nice pixels for the extra vines and waterfall, though i have a doubt on how water should "bounce" on the rock.
the shading of rocks as we go further away from the "grass line" suggested me that i'm seeing floating rocks that is large at its top and narrow at the bottom -- which wasn't disturbing me earlier given the SF look of your protagonist (after all, Tyrian shooter is full of floating rocks

But the waterfall suggests something completely different: if the rocks were getting narrower, it could no longer affect water that falls from the "top edges".

hope it's clear enough, i cannot afford illustrating (@work).