I made an edit of your basic green tree. I didn't change the lineart, as that part of it seemed ok, but I used the different green shades to better define the form of the tree. I also replaced the green highlight you were using with the highlight from the yellowy-green tree, as it was brighter and more noticeable. Some of the shading's still not fantastic but I think you could learn a bit from it. In your original version I thought the shading was a bit too randomly distributed. Also, using darker shades to make the lighter side of the tree seem more rounded wasn't really necessary in my opinion.

Pretty sweet. My only crit is, as has already been mentioned, the heads of the bottom 2 are too low, their shoulders are actually covering their ears! Very, very nice other than that.

In addition to what tremulant said, I would say that the jumping animation just looks plain wierd. Generally people would push themselves off the ground with only one leg when jumping forward, and for a platform game I assume this would be the case most of the time. If he is jumping straight up, he needs to bend down a lot before the jump, bring his arms back and then possibly reach upwards with them. For the animation where he looks upwards slightly, his arms move, which I dont think is necessary. My only other crit would be that his head might be a bit too far forwards, but maybe that's just me. Other than that, very nice work.

Yeah, you guys are probably right about the selout. I was hoping it'd work but I suppose it's fairly unworkable with only 4 colours. At least for the sprite. Maybe it's just me but I prefer my version of the portrait to your edit helm. Anyway, all valid crits from you guys, I'm sure it'd be much better to look at on a gb screen without selout.