The problem with color is that you're emulating light (which has a color I might add) bouncing off a surface. The more intense the light, the more intense (saturated) the color, which means a lot of light is hitting that surface. On the other hand, wherever light does NOT hit, you have less saturation in the shadows simply because there's less light there. The only reason shadows have a blue color (sometimes) is because of ambient light (the color of the blue sky emits light after all, that's why you see it as blue).

So try to do it backwards than you currently are doing it.

Also keep in mind that color shifting is NOT linear -- in other words, there is no "certain amount" that you shift colors toward or away from a hue or saturation level. Every artist does it differently to some extent. The amount you do that depends on your ideal of how "vibrant" or "realistic" you want your art to appear.

Regarding the head/eyes thing...

I mentioned the eyes being creepy because they are unnaturally jarring (uncanny valley-esque), not because they are stylistically bad. It's kind of like what happens when you see a typically-cute anime character without their big hair. If you've never seen that, then don't do 3D modeling...

But that brings me to what I mentioned earlier -- you should consider adding more hair to the top of their head. I know a lot of people do pixel art at first because they're not confident in their drawing abilities, but stuff like that shows when you get "better" at pixel art -- but until then, it sticks out like a sore thumb to *everyone else* and you're completely blind to it until you realize exactly what's causing it one day when you're "better" -- so my advice is, don't discount anyone's thoughts on your work -- *especially* if you feel they're more experienced than you are. Most people won't say anything, and if a person with more experience tells you something about your work, knowing you're new to this, he's usually doing it for your own good -- not his. It's hard to accept criticism on something you've worked hard on and somehow finally settled on a "better" version you can accept, and then someone comes along and tells you it's wrong -- but that's all part of the game. That's the purpose of this forum entirely. I've went through it myself, and so has pretty much any decent artist anywhere. You will be told your deep-held beliefs about your art are wrong and that you're wrong for thinking them (I'm not telling you that here of course, but it happens) but you've got to toughen up and be able to ask "Well, what can I do to improve on this then?" -- because until you hear their suggestions for improvement, and sincerely attempt to implement them, you won't improve, or you will improve VERY slowly. And if you recall, I said your animations, and even your characters, were charming. They just had construction problems in their head area. Besides, just because this is pixel art, it doesn't mean people aren't going to notice when you're struggling with anatomy. That's why I tried to help you out by pointing this out to you.

To get back on topic -- in the case of your "eye" problem, I mentioned previously that you could increase the size of their hair or their forehead area. Your figures don't necessarily need smaller eyes -- they just need a sense of a skull's volume, which they currently lack relative to the size and placement of their eyes. Also, as mentioned before -- eyes sit just below the center of the head, and the skull is shrunk or elongated vertically to keep these proportions from person to person.

Sorry if I came off as rude, but I really hope I'm being helpful. Not trying to hurt anyone's feelings -- just pointing out very valid concerns if you seriously are here to get better.

She loses all kinds of volume when she bends down into the attack, almost like she turns into a mini-me.

Also she lacks anticipation before she moves her right hand to strike.

It would read better, I feel, if you gave her some counter-balance, such as putting her left arm out at a diagonal that crosses her torso in the previous frames (to show some overlapping-action) as well as emphasize her knees and legs more (give her hair more volume too).

She's a really tall babe and yet, somehow, she loses all of that when she dips down into the attack. Her front leg and back leg proportions are just waaay off and I feel she should be leaning way farther forward and stepping way farther out than she currently is. Push and exaggerate the figure. Take a look at Street Fighter Alpha 3's animations of Chun-Li -- they push her much farther than the body really can go, but it looks great because there's a lot of "snap" to the body when it pops back into proper proportions.

Just something to think about.

No problem man. Glad I could help! -- Everything looks loads better now!

The only things I see in the update that are still a bit off include the highlight on the shirt/dress and the shadow on the hair.

First, the biggest problem with the highlight on the shirt is that it's misplaced and misused. It seems to be both a backlight/rimlight *and* a light used to define form in the foreground (i.e. the arm over the head's bicept).

To address, really, both issues, you need to understand that it's okay to leave highlight speculars out where the area would be in shadow, and don't add a darker color just to call it a "shadow" because shadow is simply the absence of light! You always have bounced/ambient light, which is what the midtone in this case would address with its use alone. You'd only add highlight to areas where the planes on the form pointed most directly *toward* the light direction.

There's two ways you could handle the purple highlight with the kind of detail you have now -- as stated before, you could use it as your main color and use the midtone as your AA (though the main highlight would have to be dialed back and pushed a little more toward yellow), or you could place it on areas where there are no shadows at all to further define the planes a little better.

Oh, and the next to darkest purple you have should be made a little darker (or removed entirely) because it seems like it's only there to get in the way of the main shadow color as it is now (the hue of it is okay though! -- you could consider pushing the brightest highlight hue of the purple even more toward yellow or some other color to help the image pop a bit more!)

That's about all I've got atm. I hope that helps!

Lol, this is fun stuff. The art itself needs some work, but the concept is sound, and even the weird (verging on creepy) looking faces have a lot of charm still, despite the huge eyes.

There is a lot wrong with the color choice, lighting, and (as said before) the unnaturally large eyes that are almost too big to fit in the skull, and it's hard to know where to start, but I guess I'll start with the animation.

As far as the animation goes, it's actually very charming and well done. There's not a lot to say about it as most of the error comes from pixel technique and color choices/usage than the animation or movement of the pixels themselves, so great job on that!

I won't mention the eyes anymore because it's already been established why they're creepy (skull size / huge dilated pupils) but do consider enlarging the skull to suit the eyes better, or at least adding ears and a little more height to the hair on top of the heads if you want to keep the eye detail. Most skulls have the eye sitting at midway from the top of the head, and hair adds more volume to even that, so keep this in mind, as it will be pretty jarring to others to look at without this rule being followed.

The second thing I need to address, but possibly the most important, is color choice.

If you've looked at any of my recent posts in this section, I've mentioned that pixels represent the "reflection" of light and the diffuse scattering (like super-tiny marbles or ball-bearings) bouncing around across the surface of a 3D object. Some hit and others bounce off, and the further away you get from the center-mass of impact, the more scattering (diffuse) bouncing occurs to the point where no light reflects at all (shadow).

Note that shadow is highly contrast to light intensity, so the brighter a color (luminosity), the more contrast you need in the shadow area to offset the intensity for it to look natural.

That being said, you have WAY too little contrast between your light and shadows. Be sure to increase the distance between these shades a LOT more than you have already. You have way too many colors there that contribute next to nothing to the 3D form due to them lacking contrast, and 3D form is key, so without contrast, you cannot have 3D form.

The final thing to consider is that, since you're representing LIGHT and since every light usually has a "color" or tint to it, you should keep in mind that color when picking your colors and remember to tint them heavily depending on how intense that light is against those colors. If you think you've pushed it too far, push it farther just to be sure, but the key is to be sure to pick a hue that is not what you THINK it should be, but instead is what it actually *should* be in relation to the light's color. Also don't forget about shadows -- they have ambient light, and that ambient light has color too. In most cases, it's the color of the sky instead of the light source (i.e. the yellow sun, and the blue sky are your light/shadow colors, respectively, in an outside scene).

That should get you started.

I apologize if I sounded harsh, but hopefully you'll pick up a few useful things from this.