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So I looked at a lot of peppers, and I found a few things
red peppers are really waxy on the outside- they only ever reflect white light. no matter the lighting condition, it is always white.
peppers grow upwards when they are small and then their weight makes them flop down, that's why the stems are curved
peppers have a sort of 'skull' at the top that has a really distinct shape, and it sort of echoes down the whole pepper for a while. it's the same segments you see on bell peppers, but the smaller peppers have less distinct skulls, but echoes of this property remain
Peppers, unless twisty (torqued) or dehydrated looking, usually follow a few rules where the radius decreases as it goes down, but is a pretty even radius all the way around the center of the pepper. this can rotate along the x and z axis and it results in an s curve in chili peppers.
the end tapers pretty distinctly
so on to my crit of your pepper:
first the colors make it look more like meat. red peppers are VERY RED. even with palette affectation and stylization they should be red because HOT. hot.
Orange tones are necessary in pixel art i feel because in hi res photos you can notice some orange subsurface scattering at times on bell peppers, when the light is just right. but chili peppers appear to have a thicker waxier coating as well as having less room inside for the light to bounce around. but a pepper is a pepper in the mind, so lets use some oranges to aa the bright white highlight
the stem is pretty expressive in yours, i just opened it up, the dark colors were choking it. some more saturation to imply the colors were overlapping/occupying nearby space.
I think I learned a lot more about peppers than I wrote but it might not be something readily apparent in an edit, or pixel art.... Have you looked at a lot of peppers? just stare at them for about 5 minutes... There's a lot to notice! Make some theories. Doesn't matter if it's actually true sometimes. Because if those are things your human brain picks up on about peppers... likely it's also a clarified idea of a thought other humans have had about peppers too, just subconsciously.
