The next thing you'll want to do is shift the hues on your highlights and shadows. As a general rule, highlight hues should move towards yellow, while shadow hues move towards purple. This is more reflective of how lighting on real objects looks, albeit simplified to a great extent.

Also, his hip area is a little hard to make out still. I think it could help if you flat shaded his left leg with your darkest green, which should  make it clearer where the hip ends, and the leg begins.

Last thing that I would suggest is adding another highlight to the helmet. Right now, there isn't much that tells me that the helmet isn't made from the same material as his pants which brings down the piece.

Careful, Godslayer, you wouldn't wish to upset the pixel God Lief. Seriously, it could get dangerous.

Good to hear from you Lief, I'm a little sad to hear I won't be seeing much of you or your great work over the next year. What kind of artwork are you doing for the contract? 2d or 3d? Do you know what platform?

here's an update


No update on the mockup though. I'm haven't a lot of trouble coming up with a tile design that doesn't clash. Any suggestions here would be appreciated.

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:P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P

Actually, castlevania was pretty far from my mind when I was doing this. When I drew up that first tile I was trying to make something abstract and cartoonish so I just drew semi random squares representing light and dark areas. I kinda don't see how you would see those bricks as being realistic. I did make a more realistic tile at one point and it looks fairly different from the ones in  my mockup.

I get what you're saying about how the tiles clash stylistically with the prince, though. I'm going to take a closer look at him and try to figure out what would kind of shading, colours and details would make the tiles go better with him.

For his stance, to explain myself, I had been looking through this great little website/art resource a while ago, and wanted to try out this thing that was mentioned about curving the spine of your people to make their stances more interesting(http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/art_tut.htm : It's almost 3/4 of the way down the page near the perspective stuff and after some b&w portraits of a girl.). Looking back and forth between them, I think my arm position might be exaggerating the effect more than I had intended, I'm gonna try and work the arm into a new position, like the one in the website, and see if that helps some. I'll fix the bottom of the shirt up too.

If kerchief = neck tie sort of thing, then yes it is a kerchief. If you zoom in and look near the collar, you should see a knot and also see how the green goes into the collar. I thought it would make for a nice little secondary animation during a walk cycle.

And about the height of the walls, I can easily make them taller if I want to. They're about 2 and a 1/2 tiles high at the moment and moving it to 3 tiles high would give about 10 pixels of space.

One last thing, I forgot to attach this in my first post. It's a reference for my pixel guy. http://images.google.ca/images?q=castlequest&hl=en&btnG=Search+Images click the second link on the page. I didn't use it as a direct reference on my pixels, I hadn't actually looked at the box art for a couple months now( which is why I forgot to attach it), but it's obvious from looking at my pixels that there's a pretty direct link between them. Sorry about that, I'll try not to forget any references again.

 
I'll have an update again when I've edited the arm and shirt. I'll also try and make some replacement tiles that go better with my guy.