Overall, it’s pretty good for a first try! The proportions definitely feel cute and you have a cool aesthetic there. The only proportional issue I see is that the arms may be a bit short. When your arms are straight, your fingers usually reach down to about midway down your thigh. You may want to consider making the gun a bit larger for more clarity and to help reinforce the cuteness of the character in comparison.

In regards to the composition, you may want to dim the snow on the ground a bit so that the logo pops out more in contrast and the background feels a bit more consistent in lighting level.

I agree with Strawberry on the rendering - you have some areas which look fuzzy or blurry due to having too many colors in certain areas. One area this is happening is the pants. You’re using what appears to be 4 shades to create the shading on the pants, but you really only need two. The colors you used to blend the light and shadow are redundant at this size and are causing banding (we can see individual bands of color in an area you’ve intended to look like a gradient).

While I understand the intent of trying to smooth areas out with many colors or add texture with dithering, I recommend trying to focus on how you can make your shadows into simple shapes which define the forms of your subject based on your light source. Currently, some areas of your character are lit from the side such as the pants, whereas other areas are lit from the top left such as the chest piece or muzzle of the mask. Try to make sure these forms are consistently lit from roughly the same angle and use as few colors as possible to start out with (if needed for detail, you can add in more colors as you go).

Once you’re comfortable with this, you can start thinking about more complicated concepts of how light interacts with different materials. Like Strawberry mentioned, metal is characterized by distinct dark and light areas. This would be good for metal which is polished and has a slick, reflective surface. Rough or dusty metal might have less clear reflections and a bit of texture to it with nicks in the surface and whatnot. Don’t be afraid to use reference photos or look at objects around you to study how you might approach rendering different materials. 

Good luck and keep at it! This is good for only having started pixel art two weeks ago. Imagine what you could do in a few months or even a year if you keep practicing!

The main difference here is that a client can dispute a payment which has been made and get their money back easily (perhaps too easily, as wrongful chargebacks are an issue artists have to face sometimes) if the artist turns out to have been a scammer, whereas an artist cannot get back any time wasted if they have been scammed. The amount of risk with no downpayment is very unequal. A case can perhaps be made that the artwork can be resold, but usually it isn’t “general” enough or expansive enough to make back the lost time/money.

You argue that a client would have absolutely no reason not to pay you except in cases like emergencies, and while that would be true for legitimate clients, there are people who intend to get artwork, sketches, concepts, ideas, etc. for free if they can. Even if a piece is sent watermarked and at low resolution, some people are only after the pose, composition, color scheme, concept, design, or the fact that it’s artwork of a particular character/subject, etc.

The safest way to have a freelance transaction without a downpayment is to have a contract signed by both parties with explicitly defined expectations (such as art delivered by x date, y pay due by z date), but many artists feel this is overkill if it’s a one-off commission, and if one party breaks the contract it may be time consuming and not worth it to go through small claims court depending on how much money it is. No contract and no downpayment is not something I would recommend to any artist since it leaves you very open to unrecoverable losses.

Now, if the client is one you have worked with many times before or is generally trustworthy, you might choose to be more lax about when you ask to be paid (instead of upfront, maybe it’s in a few weeks). All of this is risk management, and it’s better to be safe than sorry if you’re doing business with someone you don’t know much about.

You don’t have to completely focus on one or the other - you can prioritize computer science while still practicing art on the side. The key is managing your time well and not burning yourself out. If you can handle programming every day and drawing some every day that’s great, but really if you can take the time to draw a little bit even once a week or once every other week that’s better than never drawing until you graduate. Use it as a way to handle the stress of university and give your mind a break, even.

MysteryMeat makes a good point in that you can use the money you make from your tech job to fund your game company endeavors. I’d also add that connections from your job or university can be valuable for trying to start a company. Just make sure all your agreements are clearly laid out on paper.

You may find that problem solving techniques you use in computer science are useful for learning art and vice versa. For example, debugging techniques can be used for figuring out weak points in your drawing skills. The more you learn, the more tools you’ll have at your disposal for problem solving and creating.

Ha, thanks, I figured they’d edit in a URL or try to hide one but decided to approve the post since it’s an interesting discussion topic. 

The happy medium, I think, would be togglable infinite scroll and/or more viewing options, like gallery-style display with rows and columns of artwork rather than single-column “feed” type display, or the ability to change thumbnail sizes. Depending on how the site is set up, you might be able to implement some viewing features just with CSS?

Searchability and sortability of tweets is cool since Twitter lacks decent search functionality, thanks for making this!