[WIP] [C+C] animating a sonic character sprite

[Linaru]

I am working on  a character sprite sheet for a sonic hack, character sprites and animations are not my strong point so i wanted to post the progress up here to get some advice as i go..

the character i am working on is the green canary named Tekno:



i am currently trying to get the standing / idle animation to work.. in these 3 frames she is supposed to be turning her head toward the screen much like sonic does underneath.
but I am having trouble replicating the effect with Tekno as her eyes are wider and more detailed and her head lacks details like sonic's ears..
currently it seems more like her head is being skewed than turning..

[Decroded]

What is she?
A hedgehog or some unkown creature?
What is the geen stuff?

whatever the situation there is really strong staircase banding in hair and it looks pillow shaded.
face colours lack contrast.
stripes of shirt seem too detailed which detracts from readability of forms, black lines are also too contrasted imo which makes the effect worse.
feet r too close together and dead straight legs throws off the balance, try bringing the rear foot left a couple of pixels and let the leg relax like sonic does.
in the sonic sprite its like he's leaning on the front leg and rear leg has less weight on it.
or try thrusting the pelvis forward like she's all perky, in idle animation she could even raise up on tippy toes a bit and thrust pelvis more to show she's keen to go for a run.

helps to know more about the personality...

[Linaru]

Techno is an old character from the sonic world who hasn't made an appearance in a decade or so..
she is supposed to be a canary (though when i was young i always thought she was a duck..)
she was basically a techy engineer character before tails suddenly became the tech expert..

http://stc.wikia.com/wiki/Tekno_the_Canary

i had to change her blue skirt to black leggings in order to squeeze her into the colour pallette



so tweaked her shading a little bit to try and improve the her top and lessen some of that staircase banding you pointed out..
also moved her leg back a little.

for her idle animation ..after she looks at the screen i was thinking of making her pull out some kind of scanner/ hand held device for  a bit.. but i want to get the head turn animation right first
in sonic's sprites the head turn animation is also used in the run animation, something to do with the way the old sonic games saved on sprite space, by reusing sections of an animations frame as much as possible..

[Linaru]

Ive made a fair few modifications and tweaks recently, these changes take her further away from her original sega design so i am a bit unsure on them




Edit:

Further alterations..