Well about the version, that's a matter of taste I guess

About your walk cycle, there is a kind of stop & slippy effect when the foot touch the ground. I removed some frame trying to fix that (Especially frame 1 and 8, in any walk animation you won't have frame where the character stands still). The walk is more dynamic though, maybe it was not the researched effect.



It's not perfect (need rework on hair for example), and I am far from an expert but it's look better imo.

Indeed, the multiply setting with brush tool is not (at all) the best approach when coming to pixel art. Simplest shading needs only 3 colors : base, shadow and light (ofc you can have less, or more, but that's a more advanced process -imo-).

"Smaller" is not the right word, in fact you want to work with 1:1 scale (1 square on picture is 1 pixel). Other scale would lead you to a bunch of mistakes.

The base of your character is great, so if you work on this color problem, you should come up with something good pretty quickly

I agree with Pusty about the dithering thing. It seems pretty "out" compared to the others characters, and (i think) it jump really to the eyes.

The girl reminds me so much of Neco Arc from Melty Blood

Sorry for the delay of my reply (Christmas & New Year festivities heh)
Thank you for this edit too, I like this fog effect the low clouds add to the scenery.
Like you said, it gives less of a "mystic" feeling as I would like. But it should be interesting to work this kind of sky on another set-up, more "blizzard-esque".

Thank you everyone for your critics, it was really interesting to see there are really two distincts point of view on this piece

Thank you for all of your feedbacks and your edits, I am glad you liked this work

@Seiseki Thank you for edit, I see a lot of good things I could use in order to improve the picture. It became obvious I need contrast, contrast, contrast !

@Neophos It's intended to be repeatable (in fact, it's already repeated), with different level of parallax (action/bta game). No way I could reproduce this
work on a larger size, with so many background to create ^^

@NaCl As in Seiseki edit, lack of contrast is terribly obvious in original picture. It could be used for an action game, so it's very interesting to point out
the distracting problematic, something I should be very careful of. Notice board should be interactive, and I like how you put this very well in your edit.

@Ambivorous I like very much how you made reflects on plateskirts and boots, metallic parts are very interesting. You gave me some really good idea and I will rework
some parts (hair color, face, metal)

I take note of all your advices, and will come back in one or two days with a reworked pic.
In particular I would:
- Add a lot more contrast (not too extrem though)
- Some colors could be eliminated, in favour of a better readability and a overall simplification (and speed up future work), especially
on the furthest background
- A bit more flat shading
- Add a gradient in the sky
- Rim lighting
- A bit more shadowy object/silhouettes in the background to break the line of sight formed by the trees ?
- Adjust character details