First Attempt at spriting ever, looking for some critique

[Aviron]

So after reading almost every tutorial I could find and spending 6 hours with Graphics Gale I've been able to do some 32x32 sprites I can consider at least decent, and before trying to do anyting else I thought I could use some advice:






Any kind of critique or comment would be nice!

[AlexHW]

they look pretty good.
What kind of direction do you want to go?
At the moment the characters use a stiff posture that doesn't emphasize more of the characters form or shape, so it's hard to tell whether you want it stiff or if you're looking to express more shape/body to the characters. Maybe this is something to experiment with?.. looking at how to develop the volume of forms.

[Aviron]

they look pretty good.
What kind of direction do you want to go?
At the moment the characters use a stiff posture that doesn't emphasize more of the characters form or shape, so it's hard to tell whether you want it stiff or if you're looking to express more shape/body to the characters. Maybe this is something to experiment with?.. looking at how to develop the volume of forms.

¿What do you mean with shape/body? (I'm sorry, english it's not my native language)
I drew the sprites in those postures because they were easier to draw. I want to use them for a game though, so I guess my new direction would be to try more dynamic postures to animate them, maybe doing a small walking animation? I can try to do one, but I'm worried about not being able to give the legs a good shape.

[AlexHW]

what I mean by shape/body is basically more volume or sense of depth/dimension to the surfaces.. Depending upon how you shade it, you can give the impression that surfaces are changing direction. However, the way you have it, the legs for example are very thin and straight, so there's not much surface area to really play with tones and lighting.
Also, the tones you do use- some of them are very similar to other tones and so its hard to read them.. though it could be related to the white background the character is on(it might be washing out the colors a little).
An animation would be interesting to see.

[Aviron]

Here's my first attempt at animation, a quick 8-frame running cycle. I still have to redo the limbs and the body is maybe moving a little too much, though:

[Grundy]

If you turn the head a little less it might look better. You'd still have the hint of motion and make it less like he is about to turn around.
In the upper speed it's less noticeable but on the lower one it appears as if the character barely lifts its legs when moving it forward.
Kinda looks like he is about to slip on a banana like that.

[AlexHW]

looks good so far. One thing I would check are the lengths of the legs. They appear to change lengths (they look longer when they are extended forwards).

[Grimsane]

I think the head rotation looks quite fine, and feeds a zany cartoon characteristic, and 1 major problem which is making it hard to judge the animation at the same time, is one one frame you have the red and blue limbs flip, so essentially for one frame he spazzes out and swaps his foreground limps with his background limbs, but yeah I think the attention needs to be paid to the legs, legs don't generally bend up, so in one of your frames you need to raise the knee, or drag below the knee back toward him, which will help with the leg length issue Alex raised

[Aviron]

New version of the running animation, adding your suggestions as well as I could. (The head is still moving too much in my opinion, but I don't know how to fix it)