New to Pixel Art

[nikiten]

Hello, I'm starting out with pixel art, mostly messing around in character maker making sprites of me and my friends' characters. I referenced the pokemon sprites a bit since that was the only one I was familiar with.

Here it is:


A lot of it is still incomplete and still looks very awkward, and I'm still unsure of how to fix them. Critique is very much appreciated. Thank you for reading!

EDIT: hello again, I realize I'm not allowed to double post, so I decided to post something I did a while ago.

I included a portion of my progress. The feet and grass still bother me a bit, it has barely any shading,  and I think it doesn't have enough contrast, so if you guys have any suggestions how to fix it, I'd appreciate it very much!

I'm not too confident with working with a lot of colors yet so I decided to keep it mostly monochromatic. I am not really good at making color ramps (I read a little about it, but color theory just won't make sense to me).

I used 6 colors in it, including black. Thank you for reading!

[YellowLime]

Common mistake: when walking or running (humanoid locomotion in general  ) the arms do the opposite thing from the legs. When the left leg is in front, the left arm goes to the back. (remember, this is to balance the weight of the body on both sides)

Your second submission looks better than the first, and not only because of size restrictions.
The shape of the shade doesn't reflect the texture of the surface it's being cast in. You should take take of the borders of the shadow and think of how each grass blade is affected individually. And the shadow should have as many colors as the grass that is outside of it (The grass inside the shadow should be just darker grass, not a single flat color (unless its a heavy contrast situation, like mid-day sun or strong lightning)).

I don't see any arms (Maybe in the first few frames) Are those just the dress' sleeves? Or maybe it's foreshortening (the arms are pointed directly at the viewer)? As you see, I'm having a hard time making sense of the upper part of the body

Finally, I find that the feet are just fine, except maybe the right one probably shouldn't be tilted so far back in a natural situation.

Hope I helped