Platformer Sprite (C+C welcome)

[paste]

Hey, I'm working on a sprite for a platformer I'm making that involves large hammers. This image is my attempt at the first frame of an idle animation, but I wanted to get some feedback before going ahead with the other frames. I was thinking of using it at maybe 3x or 4x resolution in the game:



Current:

[JoeCreates]

Hi paste. I've done a little edit to illustrate some suggestions:



Here are the main things I changed:-

• Decrease the saturation almost all round to try to make the colors a little more natural
• Increased contrast of some of the shadows
• Vary the hue a bit more going from warm in the lighter areas to cool in the darker areas
• Added a more 3D perspective to the hammer
• Note, no dithering on the hammer
• Tried to make the lighting a little more consistent (source in upper right), e.g. on the right leg
• Added shadow under the sleeve
• Made the head a little bigger and added another color to the hair

I hope something in this is useful.

[paste]

Okay, I made some adjustments. The desaturation seems like the biggest and I probably should've known that already ;] I changed the hammer a bunch, too. The biggest thing I'm having trouble with right now (or maybe just the most noticeable) is lighting strange shapes like body parts. It's not totally clear to me why the changed lighting on the legs works, but I pretty much followed your edits as an example. Here's the current iteration: