Fry: Thanks!

JJ Naas: That's originally what I had thought, when I tried it it got rather busy rather quickly. Which is how I came to the conclusion that less is more. Given the small space that the water takes up you can't really give off the impression of clouds reflected upon it. Well, you could but, it'd take a fair amount of colors with shades very close to the water's base colors. Else it wouldn't be subtle enough. Given this piece's very nice and complete feeling palette more colors would only hurt it.

That's a nice edit on the stones Fry. I think the water kind of looks like a simplified different colored version of the stones now though. Perhaps some brighter highlights and a glossier feel would help that out. Maybe the issues is that the water has some heavy shadows outlining parts of it.

Apparently, this is a Tsugumo redeux funfest! I too did an edit after seeing Helm's post. I'll agree with him indefinitely on his comments.

As someone who started off pixeling by reading your tutorials and as someone who saw your mage knight dump and was in awe at your skills I was a bit surprised to see that this was done by you. I know how making pixel art as a profession affects how you do it professionally and your tileset reflects that. The difference in my tilesets I do professionally versus the ones I do as a hobby are quite evident. When somebody is paying you 20+ dollars an hour to do something you tend to want to get it done quickly and efficiently rather than beautifully and timey. Fortunately for me I am impatient and am usually able to find a balance between time and beauty. With tilesets that is. I've done countless amounts of them and they're the reason I was able to make it as a freelancer for the past year and a half. Once again, your tutorials played a part in my skills.

The main problems I noticed with the tileset were; lack of unity, sketchy/unreadable objects, and glaring dirt and grass tiles.

I did enjoy the fall version best so I took a stab at redoing that one. The first thing I did was redo the dirt/sand tile. It tiled rather poorly and had too much contrast for the huge expanse it covered. As Helm said, it's better to go with several variations, which is something I normally do. If I'm doing 16x16 tiles I'll usually make one 32x32 tile for tiles that cover large areas. In tradition of old school RPGs and in fairness to you I went with one tile though. Whether or not it was meant to be sand I couldn't very well tell so I went with more dirt like colors.

Next up was the bush. It looked like a grainy square shaped blob to me. I'm not sure how many colors were in it but it felt like too many for it's size. I reduced it down to 5 and focused on details that stood out rather than numerous details. Which I feel is where the granularity came from most likely.

The grass, I feel, suffered most by the choice of colors. While it's cool to hue shift and all that jazz, grass usually isn't the place to do it. The blue stood out too much against the greens and overpowered the whole thing. Originally I tried to recreate your texture in a less contrasty way but, it's just not my style so I went with my traditional method of drawing in blades with the darkest color, thinning them out with the midrange color and then use highlights to break up any tiling. It's an enduring process that usually has me going back and forth between steps but it works fairly well every time. I don't have much else to say on this other than most of the dirt/sand comments apply here.

Finally, there is the tree. Basically your "shortcut" butchered any hopes the tree may have had. It certainly works best in the fall colors but the other color sets create an undistinguishable mass. The lighting, while making sense is too sporadic to lead the eyes to believe that it's where it's supposed to be. The vines blend in too much to be seen as vines and look more like sketchy protrusions. I did like the trunk and I would've left it except I wanted to maintain the sense of style I had "created" up to this point. There's not much to say as to what I did. I basically took the silhouette of the tree and took the time to shade the whole thing rather than stamping it. I have no doubt that this is something you could achieve had you took the time to do so.

The whole image uses 20 colors, as opposed to 38 was it? I managed to get rather low because I shared the paltette between things. I know that's usually a bad thing when making tilesets or any other game art because you can't easily change a certain aspect if you need to but, since it's for hobby reasons and you have ultimate control, there is more lenience. I tried to maintain your sense of saturation and desaturation while creating more fall like colors that worked together. I feel that it turned out fairly well.

I think that pretty much covers everything I wanted to cover. I usually don't go so indepth with critiques but I felt that this was probably a once in a lifetime opportunity and as someone who looks up to you in some way shape or form, it'd nice to hear your thoughts on my thoughts. Haha... K enough of that.

I decided to play devil's advocate here and say that outlines aren't necessarily bad. Especially on a sprite this size. Either you're going to want to use something like 3 colors with high contrast or use outlines. If you don't, you'll end up with a muddled mess. The former option is best reserved for nes sprites though.

Anyways, I used some high contrast high, high saturation colors, and the same general dark outline color. Although, I did outline some areas lighter than others to give it a less 2d look.

Please note that I butchered the perspective on his right arm since the original pose looked prety peculiar and confusing. But now his right arm is raised up a bit more and therefore kind of kills it. I didn't really realize it or else I might've pushed it down a bit. XD