thanks for the feedback!

@Chadtech
made horns a bit less weird shaped

@MysteryMeat
yah, I don't want to rely on dithering (usually if I am going to do it I would approach it more as "texturing," but I don't want to do that for this for now. I did make one of the colors lighter since it was close to the dark blue though, so hopefully the banding is better or/and seems more like a natural cut off for shadows.

@Decroded
Thanks of the video! It's easy to forget basics, I made some edits to try and make the lighting more realistic.

In general also tried adding some more detail to the leg and some other tweaks:
old    new

looks pretty good! some small things:
-arm with shield looks shorter than arm with sword (maybe is bent, but then it's bent all the time?)
-the ribs don't read like they're getting closer together when the skeleton leans in/breathes out. maybe use the dark bone shade for the ribs there instead of the shadow color?
-you also lose the impression that the shoulder pad is ridged since a lot of the dots disappear.

I think it's looking better!

One thing I noticed is how the highlights on the bricks are set against the dark color, so the corners still feel sharp where the highlights meet the dark cement:


There's a couple things you could do here... here's a first edit I made (you can click to zoom in):

You can imagine for the corner pixels some of the highlight is hitting that corner, but not all, so it's not as bright as the highlight color. So what I did here was just take a slightly darker color than the highlight (the base color of the brick) and placed it in the corners. This makes the corner look not as sharp.

However this does have an unintended side effect of making the top right and bottom left of each brick look sharper instead of rounder:


I can go about making these corners softer the same way though, by choosing a darker color to soften those corners:


That's some brief process that's hopefully helpful for how you want the bricks to look. An assumption I'm making here though is that you want to corner to just be slightly rounded- there are times where you do want some sharpness, but usually when you want to define a harder edge.

For the colors, I would say you could probably push it more green. You mentioned "kind of unnoticeable" so that means you could tell that it was hard to see it was slightly green. So make more green until it reaches a level you think is good, like maybe "kind of noticeable" or "noticeable" or so and so.

I would also like to reiterate going through this tutorial on pixeljoint (http://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299). It covers some of the fundamentals for creating pixel art as well as defining a lot of the terminology.

1. current dithering is better than your tiles before, as it shows a more consistent light source from the upper left. That being said though, dithering can added unwanted textures, especially for small tiles like this. You can try experimenting with solid shading as well.

2. it is more readable than before.

I think it's okay if it takes you long time, but saying that you were lazy feels like you didn't try very hard, and makes it harder for people to potentially respond.

I would also look back to kilenc's post and think about varying colors (at least hue shifting the colors a bit so it's not just all greyscale). To add to that a bit, it can help to look at references to help inform how you make your tiles, especially if you don't know/not sure what something may look like. Right now you have very small/thin bricks, is there reasoning behind that? Either way, answering that question can help better define what you want to brick wall to look like (for example, a wall made out of stones of various sizes vs a regular brick wall).