Thank you very much, I'll try and play with the location of the mouth and see what happens, the banding is going to be fixed to my capabilities when I'm more confident about his general shape (at least what I notice, I assume you meant around the eyes and brows).
This is how far I've got with the sprite by the way, it's still obviously very much a wip, I think I mainly need to flap the wings and wave the tail, I'd be happy to get criticism and ideas.
Regarding the background, I've actually made a thread about it in animation section
http://wayofthepixel.net/index.php?topic=18003.0I tried doing the background traditionally at first, but it seemed like it would take forever and I got stuck very quickly.
I ended up using a variation of this technique
http://wayofthepixel.net/index.php?topic=16531.0I took this picture
heavily filtered and transformed it, added a bunch of different gradient layers and cloud filter layers from photoshop with different blending options, and this is what turned out.
The original file was huge but when I decided to animate it, I had to make it much smaller, tile it, and make it less interesting as a result. Also, the process was mostly an hour of experimentation after I started going in this direction, the animation is simply playing with the opacity of 1 of the layers.
