Don't dither the skin. You have enough colours that it is unnecessary, and it adds a fuzzy texture to what should be a smooth surface.

I don't think 'do or don't dither' is the way to look at it, you should use dithering as a blending tool 'where needed' but I agree that over doing it can result in unwanted texture. There are other ways to make colour transitions smoother by ensuring you have good values in your palette, consider un-dithering the face and then see if your at a point were any subtle uses of the technique can improve the smoothness or adds a texture.

But adding texture can improve an image, if a face was left un-dithered it could result in looking very plastic or cartoony; which is why I suggest judging where and when to use it. For instance crinkles, stubble, blemishes etc.

In terms of readability I do like Lazycow's edit, but for a game I feel this could all be perceived as too harsh on the eyes. The contrast with this is too extreme in my opinion but you definately could push the values more without loosing too much atmosphere. It is definately a stylistic option but with higher contrast you've sacrificed your control of saturation.

The motivation behind my edit was more to push you in the right direction as I didnt want you to stray too far from what works with your original concept, I feared too much of a radical change could put a huge spanner in your works.

Here I've made another edit to quickly to illustrate if you did want to inject a tad bit more contrast into this without sacrificing too much atmosphere,

(MEGAQUICK EDIT)


Also to distinguish the sprites a bit more, you could give your sprites a particular colour variable, I've also outlined your sprites.

Hope this helps you out.

I really like the atmosphere of this, although I think that your palette may be watering down the detail in parts. It'd be worth trying to draw out the foreground a tad more to distinguish whats actually a playable platform. An easy you could do this is to simply make alterations to your palette in way by giving higher contrast to your foreground and less to your background. A toggle of saturation here will also push back or draw forward parts.



No preference to the hue's used although, I feel it may be too purple.

Sorry The 7th Sin I really don't think that tutorial would help Juniorps. You should approach this as you would do in any other art form, I suggest you use some good old fashioned observation and work on developing a better understanding of the shapes and depth. I think CodeCriminal has got this on the right track but I strongly suggest gathering a good variety of real life references, you can then at least work on emulating the correct shapes and work on making yourself much more familiar with what you want to portray.

But I do stress, if you're struggling to create convincing clouds really do go back to the bare basics of it, this should be in mind with everything you do. Break it down to the bare bones (possibly a simple silhouette) and built this up step by step, colour by colour whilst working closely with observations and the references you've gathered. If you jump straight into something too complex you'll find you'll lose any grasp of convincing shapes and depth you initially had..

Do you have any atempts to show, I think we would be able to offer much better advice with something visual to go off.

I prefered this with some outlining, nothing too fab im kinda rusty but I definately think you could use this palette more efficiently. Most likely over done it with the dithering considering its still such a small character but still wanted to add some more interest here and there.



love the turtle 

think you could have some improvements with the palette, but just thought I should show how you can make the most of what you have. If anything you could tweek values, hue and saturation to get it spot on.

Hope anything helps, looking forward to any updates.