How's this?
god this thread's a mess. I going to stop working on 4-5 color sprites and concentrate on stuff that isn't artificial.
New topic
An Acorn
with a sombrero
...yea
Which Im planning to add arms and legs later on
thats an incredible amount of banding you've got going on there
right now all you have is a pillow shaded mess
you need to shade whilst paying attention to the overall form of your sprite; make sure the shading gives it proper volume
you could also probably lose at least a shade from each of your palette swatches
It'd probably be easier to avoid your shading problems if you had the light source coming from somewhere other than the center