they don't read very well as talk Sprites, those tend to have a lot more emphasis on both pose and mouth movements. they're usually done from the torso up like in Phoenix right for that reason
You know, it never occurred to me that talk sprites should probably have mouths...
Eh, I still wanted to make bigger sprites as practice. I got the idea because I made blue guy's shrug animation and didn't feel it was worth posting by itself because it was so simple.
I like the concept though.
The larger (no face) portraits keep the 'mystery' air about the characters, and it could be an interesting style if the pose of the portrait was the thing that did the "talking" and that pose changed (via action lines and whatnot) as the mood changes in the conversation.
Obviously with this approach the "mirroring" of the sprite to match the portrait actually looks "wrong", but the worst offender is that when you show such a nicely-detailed sprite that matches the in-game sprite, you unintentionally make the viewer subconsciously wish that the smaller sprite would be as detailed -- and thus break the overall style of your flat-shaded chars! ( -- very bad btw!)
Regardless, this is a good take on trying something new -- and it
allllmost works.
As for your blue dude animation (since we're in the animation forum), it really didn't look like a "shrug" to me. More like a "Come on! I'm open! Try to hit me!" gesture.
Also, for the bigger blue dude, the main thing I see is that the (nearest to us) knee is kind of janky. It doesn't look like there's enough room for his calves to fit to his (particularly chunky) ankle as it flows down to his (seemingly tiny compared to the other) foot.
Outside of these things, the shading looks a bit "off" on the blond girl (there doesn't seem to be any distinct light source, and the lighting shown so far is a bit too heavy to not be from something direct (especially on the nearest-to-us leg). This is clearly not ambient lighting, but that is mostly because the highlight color is so close to the middle color (and doesn't seem to have much sky lighting in its color -- it probably needs to be hue-shifted to the environment's ambient light color a bit). The blue dude's colors seem to be a lot more well-chosen though, so props there.
One other tip -- please remember on the back leg of the "Capcom" style shading, don't be afraid to push it to the darkest color sooner. Usually they reserve 5 color entries (instead of just 3) for areas that have lots of surface-area volumes to cover (such as a legs) -- so an additional darker "red" color entry could help you define the volume better there (rather than making such a stark transition to the black outline.)
