I'm new here, but maybe I can help. Ignore anything you don't agree with though, I am almost nil on experience.

First off, your rendition is very hard to read. I couldn't tell what it was at first. Looking at your reference, I can see a semblance, but the two don't seem to correlate in many ways. These look like they may be stylistic choices, so maybe I'm just completely overseeing it, but... where are the legs? And arm-paw things? A lot of space is taken up by those in the reference, and I don't see either here.

Apart from the amputations, I found the face hard to read. Now I know that's a smile in the face from your reference, but at first it looked less like that. If I knew the character I could have guessed perhaps, but I don't. Maybe you could make it thinner, maybe anti-alias it.

The body could also use some more shading. At the moment it looks like a piece of flat felt, not really a flowing skirt. It's also a different size viewing from the front and the back (or at least it appears to be) and that's a bit unsettling. (I think the size you used for the rear view is better, personally. More proportional, for what proportionality's worth ) (And it looks like you just forgot to put on an outline. IMO, either it should have an outline around the whole thing, or none at all. For now it looks like the head's much more defined than the body.)

I must complement you on the hood though. I can really tell the ears are ears, and the hood is a hood. The shading's really nice, and the back matches the front well.

Good luck with this, it could be neat. Looks like a sprite from an RPG or something.

I tried adding detail into the center part of the pillow... but after a while I still couldn't figure out what to put in there. This is the best it got in my experiments, but I know it can be better. I also attempted simple anti-aliasing on the top edge, because even without the hard highlight it still looked jagged. (It could just be my prejudice against it though considering how jaggy it looked before I changed it.)

Anyway, update (not even sure if it's the right direction):

Thanks for the help.

I'm really new here... just posted my first pixel-art thing, but I think I can say one thing without being good yet.

It's about the ground. It looks like you used the lazy way (no offense) and duplicated and flipped a little bit to make it seamless. This is NOT the way you should do this.

Assuming you use Photoshop, there's a really easy way to fix up a seamless texture.

• First, put your tile into a new file, 64x64 or however big that tile is, or whatever you want to seamlessify.
• Paste it in, and make sure it fills the whole frame.
• Make sure it looks good. If you want to use the same thing you have now, get rid of half of it so it doesn't look mirrored.
• Here's the magic: Filters -> Other -> Offset. Put in half of the sprite's dimensions for each offset: for 64x64 it would be 32 and 32.
• Press OK. MAGIC! And your sprite now has seams down and across the center.
• Now just whip out your pencil tool and edit the seam to make it work. Move some chunks of dirt around until you can't see the seams anymore.
• Do the offset again, with the same parameters, and it'll be back to like it was, except perhaps with seams in the center again.
• Fix those up, and you have a seamless texture!

Sorry if that was hard to understand, but it's incredibly useful. (And ok, it's not magic. It's just offsetting your sprite by a set amount in pixels so you can see how the edges interact. )

I've been cycling through ideas for a game to make for the iPhone, when I thought of this one, which happens to deal with adventure-based territory conflict on Mars. I thought it showed some promise. I miscalculated that this would require art . I don't think this idea is quite good enough to pay for my art to be well-made (and my artist friend never gets back to me on these little ideas) so I whipped out photoshop, thought up a few colors to start with, and drew some stuff.

C&C wanted and greatly appreciated.

They look so bland with the art of the... uh... forum software around them.

First post!