Small rock platform

[Decroded]

Hey guys I'm new here and inexperienced with pixel art.
I've been trying to work out how to draw rocks to use in my action-rpg platform game and this is what I came up with last night.
No special features, just plain old repetative rocks but its the first time it hasn't turned out totally crap so I thought I would post it 



I'm just using the image editor in Game Maker 8 Pro without any preparation sketches.
Any feedback or handy info for a noob is welcome.

Also I'm generally really hopeless with colours so if any of you pros have some helpful info, tutorials etc on building palettes that would be great   
I have trouble with how to get nice colours where for example green grass might have more blue in the shadowy bits and more yellow in the highlight for example, is there a technique to this sort of thing or do people just do it by eye?
Another example is how to make a stone block look like it has multiple light sources of different colours.
And if there is cool techniques to add clear, shiny water (rather than hardcore blue) trickling over rocks.
Anything along those lines is helpful   

[heyy13]

You can half the colours immediatly by colour replacement and it will look virtually the same. I'd say that's the first step. :]

Other then that i'd add some blues to the shadows and play with blending colours so it still looks brown but is a combination of tones. Real soil's colour is made up of little tiny differant coloured particals which when all mixed up look brown. So a similar approach seems to work pretty well on rocks.



Hue Shift - 4 Colour - Original :]

Hope this helps!

[Krammy]

I see someone already replied while I was trying my hand at this. I'd pretty much say the same thing. Try to change the colour too give it more excitement, as well, lower the amount of colours you use, since you're really using more than you need to.

Here's my attempt.


As you can see, I went for more of a cartoony dirt colour using reds instead of going to from gray -> blue. I also pumped the saturation up quite a bit. Either way, hope you get some good advice from this thread, the actual shape is pretty well done in my opinion.

SUPER EDIT: My advice for colours would be to use higher saturation in general, you can lower the saturation as you go lighter and lighter with colours, as it's less noticable, but for darker colours, when you lower the saturation, it always seems to turn out boring. Also, hue shifting. For example starting with a light yellow -> dark red. This can be applied to other colours as well.

[Decroded]

Here's a couple of colour edits I did for fun to try to learn about pallettes.





So that is like a little floating platform.
Still alot of colours I know but I just can't let go yet lol.

I'm also trying to build a 16x16 tileset of rock platforms that I can use in game.
I had trouble resolving the bottom of the "wall" where there would need to be tiles to join to a lower rock path, or to close off if nothing joining underneath.
It got late and I went wierd on it so I need to try again.
Any input, fixes, even rough stuff I can detail is appreciated :-)
Once I make it look good and tile, will be plugged into my working game engine to replace the crappy tileset I have now.
And the plan is to obviously modify the base tiles heaps to add detail like roots, grass, waterfalls etc.


EDIT:
Another update. Not overly happy with how it is coming along but its better than it was lol.
Any info about how to make it look better is welcome, especially with shapes and shading...