[WIP]not verry much like most rpg hero's....

[zez]

Alright, so some minor amount of explanation. This is the main character for an RPG I may or may not make once I finish my current (kind of mostly almost finished) project.
The legs are pretty unfinished, the rest... needs some work. The bits that are particularly troublesome are the tits, the neck, and the flower/tootoo thing.
The neck is supposed to be overly slender and long, but Im having some difficulty getting it to come out right. I either end up making her look like a geraf, or the effect gets slightly lost. Im also a tad bit annoyed with it, because I know the neck should kind of blend its way into the area of the head just under her ears, but if I do that its pretty much impossible to make it sender, so meh.
The tits are mostly just... busy. In my concept sketches, I had these vines kind of circling up under them, and covering/cupping them with some over sized leaves, but conveying that at this size without it just looking busy is giving me a headache.
The tootoo, just doesnt look like its coming out far enough, basically. I think I could maybe add a highlight? I feel kind of ridicules using another color on just that part, but it would be shared by the weapon... so that might be okay...

I was also trying for a kind of weird effect with the 'outlines' on this one, and Im not really sure how well I pulled it off. I kind of wish wash on weather I think the effect worked or not, so I think just an extra set of eyes on that would do me wonders. Basically, I was looking at a bunch of french early impressionist/late romantic stuff, and noticed this really neat effect, where they would kind of use something like sellout (this is more the late romantic side of things, mind you. Bouguereau's Birth of Venus is a prime example.) to make the figures glow, by using the highlight rather then the shadow. I tried to apply something kind of like it, but with the glow coming more from the light source, as apposed to back lighting, so that it could still blend in with varied environments.
Unfortunately, Im nowhere near that level of talented, so Im kind of unsure of the affect I got.

[Tourist]

About the neck, I honestly think no one will notice.  A 3-pixel wide neck centered on the chin is ok.  But since it bothers you (and we pixel artists are detail oriented, so why not) I tried to come up with a solution.

Possible problem:  A 3-pixel wide neck is too narrow,  5-pixel wide neck is too wide, and a 4-pixel wide neck is not symmetrical.

Solution 1: add a half pixel to either side of the neck.  Wrap the neck and shoulders with the red vines, and add a color that is half skin, half vine.  Use this color for the extra neck pixels and the result would look like a 4 pixel wide neck.

Solution 2: Use a 4-pixel wide neck, but turn the torso so that the neck is no longer symmetrical.  This is what I used in the edit below.  It's a bit of a trick, but it works ok.  It also lets you be a bit vague about the length of the neck since the torso is not on a flat plane towards the viewer.

Solution 3: Ignore the thin neck.  If you really want to distract from it, let hair grow long behind the head, filling in the gap between jaw-line and shoulder.  No one will notice the neck dimensions at all.

Other comments:
You mention that the figure is tall and willowy, but she's got giant breasts.  That is unusual for tall and thin.
I think the problem with the tutu is that there is no body underneath.  No hips or belly to help shape the thing.  It's also caught between being hanging down like a skirt and sticking out like, well, a tutu.
I find it difficult to use less than 4 colors for round forms like skin/body parts.  I like light, medium, medium-dark, and dark/edge.

A couple of (partial) edits.



The first is just the figure you have with the torso turned to the side.  This keeps the shoulders and giant breasts.  The groin is raised and the torso shortened, with the legs sketched in at the hips about where they would go.

The second edit is based on the first, but it is thinner.  The face and hair were reworked to keep with the thinner look and highlights added to the torso . 

Hope this helps,
Tourist

[zez]

Awesome.
That helps a lot, and you are totally right about the tits detracting from the willowy look. I did them that way in the first place so that I would have enough room to add some leaves covering them to make this umm... pj-13 ish (I have aspirations of eventually releasing this project on the xbox live indie arcade, so full frontal is kind of a nono) but I couldnt really get leaves to scan. Im thinking a solution would be to change the skin tone to more of a brown and use the green for the vines and leaves, and then do the leaves fairly small (what with not having a tun of pixel real estate there) but in the green, so the contrast is more noticeable and they read more like leaves (Dead leaves are not really iconic enough to get away with skimping on details it seems.)

As for the lack of colors, I think another shade on most of it (another skin shade and probably another tootoo/flower shade) would do this thing wonders, Im just really used to spriting at lower resolutions, and in considerably more cartoony styles. That's totally not me making an excuse for skimping on details/shading on this, just hopefully some degree of explanation for my sub par execution...

(for some reference, my current project -> http://zez.herobo.com/a52/as52ninjaassault.swf is in the style Im most comfortable with, and hasnt been posted here largly due to the fact that Im on far too much of a time constraint to do anything fancy with the graphics, averaging about 1~2 hours per animation and around 2 per character design/sprite.)
... oh, that link is for the remake of action 52, specifically 'ninja assault' and is designed to basically be a cross between a beatemup (double dragon, streets of rage, final fight etc etc) a platformer (ninja gaiden specifically) and a more traditional fighting game.... all with two buttons. Umm... it has fighting game style moves? Also does the smash bro's thing where direction + attack = a different attack.... also its way to much of a twitchy platformer for beatemup combat to make any sense.