I want to ask you one thing: where is the lightsource? I also think the grey bricks could be shaded the same way as the red ones (dithering, cracks etc.).
If you have too many colours you could reduce the amount by indexing the image. When you index you decide the number of colours to be used. In your case you have the wall with 8 colours and the door has a lot, so I would: take (copy) the door alone, open a new file, paste the door in the new file and crop the image, index the image.
I tried two solutions: The first image is the door you have; the second is indexed with 16 colours; the third with 8 colours.
Then you could work on that and fix it to your liking.
Alternatively you decide the palette beforehand (number of colours, which tones etc.) and draw it. There's another method: you could use the palette you decided for indexing the image.
I don't want to come off as rude, but it looks like you resized a jpeg (or a blurred image) for the door. There are too many shades of the same colours.
The lit parts are all over the place. When shading you have to think about where the lightsource is. - The face, part of the hat and the neck is lit from our right, so I assume the lightsource is there; - however, I see that the ear and hair receive light from the left or from above. - the nose seems to be lit from our point of view (no shadows apart from the dithering you put there, so I don't know).
I won't comment on the lineart since I don't know what you're going for.
My first thought is that this is a pretty frickin huge canvas for a pixel art piece. And if you're going for a detailed, photorealistic style, then you've got a whole lot of work ahead of you. I imagine the background could turn out to be more work than the fish, really. Personally, I would make this smaller, especially since you're not quite sure about the technique you're going to use for the background.
I've started a fair number of pixel art pieces that were too big, without really knowing how I was going to pixel them. Then you spend a whole lot of time making changes every time someone offers advice, since the canvas is so huge, and eventually you run out of steam.
Just my humble opinion. If you're really eager to work on a big piece like this and put in the hours, I wish you lots of luck. Unfortunately, I can't really offer any constructive criticism yet.
I know what you mean. This is actually my first try at making backgrounds like this.
If you checked the filename this was thought to be a present for my dad; I have 5 days left, I probably won't finish it in time, but at least I'll try in this scale. Then I could reduce the canvas (remake it smaller). As far as details converning the background, for now it's fine (the bottom part will be darker), I just have to work on the curviness of the image as Joe suggested. And I'm now putting scales to the fish like Kazuya adviced me to do.
So, for a while, I'll keep it this scale, then I'll think about remaking it.
When I publish something in dA or here or anywhere, it's to keep track of my progress, to see if I have improved or I got worse. Sharing with people is also one of the reasons I do and with that I expect feedback, but if I don't receive it then I ask for it so that I can get better. And if I don't receive it after that, that's ok, I guess... it's not a problem.
If others' work gets recognition, I'm happy for them. But! It must be good for my eyes, otherwise I get upset and try to make it better. It's not the case here in this forum (I don't count my edits here, which are made to help people and are part of my feedback), but in another forum I'm registered in.
There's this guy who is "known" to convert stuff from a certain style to CvS (it stands for Capcom vs SNK 1/2, the videogame crossover/s). What I mean by converting is "re-sprite a sprite from one style to another"; but his "convertions" (as he calls them, I know the word is 'conversions') don't follow the CvS style (wrong lightsource, wrong shading), however most people consider his style the right one. So I think: "are they blind or something?" and start converting a sprite myself to show that "that's how you do it", together with some criticism.
If you see, there's a little silent competition between myself and the "blind" people who praise a "spriter" (I'll call him 're-shader' next time) that re-shades a full set of sprites in little time... and this is also another thing that irks me: you put so little time into converting stuff, so it's obvious your stuff is not perfect... but this 're-shader' doesn't care and so the others. And giving feedback to him is mostly useless because, although he starts following it in the first moments, he then proceeds to make the same identical mistakes. But I'm digressing, this is not the topic about feedback.
So, if you read the spoiler, what I want to tell you (even if I went off-topic in the last phrases) is that competition is not necessarily a bad, childish thing but it can give you an idea of what to do.
I haven't edited the pose, but I fixed the shading, did very very little fixes to the arms and hands and also finished the face in four different ways. But the fourth one is the best one I made. However I noticed that there isn't a lot of contrast, so I upped it a bit:
The lightsource is above her, right? I like the style, but I can't help but notice that there's something about the arms, like one is longer than the other, maybe it's just an impression.
If you want us to edit your sprites, please post them at their normal scale (I mean, I have them, I can edit them, but what about the others?). This forum has a built-in feature which lets you magnify/zoom in, so there's no need for big sprites.
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And giving feedback to him is mostly useless because, although he starts following it in the first moments, he then proceeds to make the same identical mistakes. But I'm digressing, this is not the topic about feedback.
