Hope you don't mind another novella-sized reply. I tend to ramble on a bit and my tendency to provide (written) examples with everything doesn't really help there. Just give me a (digital) slap if you want me to tone it down a little.

You're making nice progress.

Keep working a little on cutting those down, but 21 certainly is a lot closer to a "sane" number of colours for an image like this than 64.

Yeah, I could tell you hadn't done your blues yet, as they are still rather numerous. Not necessarily bad if they'd all serve distinct purposes, but the fact that one has to zoom to properly tell apart the different shades means you can fairly safely cut at least one or two of those out. Especially the darker half of the blue ramp is really, *really* close together. If nothing else, consider at least merging 1d53c6 and 1e55cc. (2nd & 3rd darkest blue respectively) At 2x or even 4x zoom one has to pay a lot of attention to tell those two apart--meaning the difference is effectively invisible at 1x. Probably worth it to darken your darkest blue a bit or merge it in with those two, for that matter.

Hi, I had a fiddle with this before your last post there... anyway to be honest I was not sure if the perspective of this little ship was top-down or  top-down+behind .. from looking at your engines, in particular the circular vents I assumed this was top-down+behind.

Ok so love your ship, very cute, it reminds me of the very very first things I did with pixel art too which was little ships much like yours for a shooter game concept.

Anyway I think you did pretty well with things, but I could not help but make a few changes, in particular to the perspective and shading. I have provided you a strip of images so you can see the iterations and perhaps get some hints with how to improve your shading and highlighting.

If your idea was to have a top-down look, then I think you need to start by changing your vents to ovals (squashed horizontally) and work up from there. I didn't have time to make you a top-down version.

I don't think that fits the sleek fiberglass look I'm assuming you're going for!

One thing I notice is that the section of the wings between the 'body' and the engines doesn't quite match the angle or width of the external-most wingsections.

You're also using more colours than necessary: the image has 64 of them while you would be able to reach the same effect you currently have with maybe 9-12 of them. (3-4 blues, cyans and greys each should be quite sufficient for this until/unless you get to further shading. Even so, I'd increase the contrast between them some, and it's probably also possible to have one of the light cyans/light greys be the same shade and use it for both.)

As for further shading, there's a few things to keep in mind. Light (including direction, brightness and colour), shape (which determines where light does or does not hit and thus where there are shadows--combined with direction of light, at least) and material (does it absorb most light? Does it strongly reflect? Does light pass through it?) Before going too deep into further shading, though, it'd be a good idea to reduce the colours you already have, else you likely end up with an unmanageable number of them.