My First Sprite! Critiques and Help Needed

[Jetahloo]

Hello everyone,
I'd Like to share my very first pixel art character/sprite!



I have always enjoyed pixel art as a medium and have decided to start learning in and practicing it in my free time recently with Photoshop.
The result was this odd looking fancy knight-looking guy along with a few other odd characters.
If you look closely, you can see my sloppy attempt at lighting and adding depth to my character along with some odd gestures and stances from my characters. I want to get better at all aspects of this art and some help with this would be great showing how to create detailed lighting and how to create finished high-quality characters along with some animation perhaps! Any help/Critique/Link to a lesson or video is well appreciated. Thanks! 

Here are some more characters made on Day One:

[Roach]

I like your designs, you should practice on your shading/ light source.
here's a quick edit I did

I intensified part of the outline, shaded a bit more, and also modified the proportions better to where I felt like they weren't as wonky. I think you should work on your proportions as well. I must say, the tree people guy whatever's are my favorite designs of yours.

[Jetahloo]

I like your designs, you should practice on your shading/ light source.
here's a quick edit I did

I intensified part of the outline, shaded a bit more, and also modified the proportions better to where I felt like they weren't as wonky. I think you should work on your proportions as well. I must say, the tree people guy whatever's are my favorite designs of yours.

Ah! I see what I was doing wrong with the lighting now! I was creating shadows for light without a set light-source so the shading was unorganized. Thank you! That's really helpful and I love what you did with the knights legs, I'm still practicing proportions on characters and how to draw appealing grass. and my tree people are suppose to be a sort of bronze knight farmer! I have yet to learn how to make something look "metallic" yet  .
And thank you William! I've been fooling around in Photoshop for the past 3 years and its a great tool to know, does anyone know if there's any better alternatives for pixel art though? or is Photoshop what the pros use?   

[Yuushia]

There's something wrong with the position : head, shoulders and legs are seen from 3/4 side, but torso is fully front-view and seems totally off because of that.
Correcting this should help to give more depth to your character

Try to imagine a kind of box which include the body :



About pixel art software, it's a matter of taste, really. Personnally, I prefer to use a full pixel dedicaced soft (Aseprite), sometimes coupled with Photoshop for specific functionalities (when I am looking for a good colors palette it's easier to modulate "ambiance", for example).

Pyxel Edit is interesting in case you need to make tilesets, too.

[Roach]

I like your designs, you should practice on your shading/ light source.
here's a quick edit I did

I intensified part of the outline, shaded a bit more, and also modified the proportions better to where I felt like they weren't as wonky. I think you should work on your proportions as well. I must say, the tree people guy whatever's are my favorite designs of yours.

Ah! I see what I was doing wrong with the lighting now! I was creating shadows for light without a set light-source so the shading was unorganized. Thank you! That's really helpful and I love what you did with the knights legs, I'm still practicing proportions on characters and how to draw appealing grass. and my tree people are suppose to be a sort of bronze knight farmer! I have yet to learn how to make something look "metallic" yet  .
And thank you William! I've been fooling around in Photoshop for the past 3 years and its a great tool to know, does anyone know if there's any better alternatives for pixel art though? or is Photoshop what the pros use?   

Lol, to hell with what the pros use, I still use a mouse and Ms. Paint . I've recently been getting into graphics gale however. Photoshop is perfectly fine aswell.