The VG Resource

your mario looks like his neck is on his chin!! you need move the head for ward! Maybe the contrast could be more, too!

His mustache is too thin. Mario's big mustache is what makes him iconic, in my opinion. I'd recommend thickening it up a bit.

Picking good colours is something you just need to learn. For now, the first step would be to consider contrast. Make your shades more different, avoid using similar colours. The darker shades can be darker, brighter shades brighter. You can replace the second-darkest blue shade with the darkest and cut the colour count while doing so, too. Also, you can vary the saturation (I think almost all of your colours use full saturation). I'd suggest you to play around with various colour settings and see what happens! Never hesitate to experiment.

Now you've dropped the saturation a tad too far ;-)

There's two things I'd like to mention that aren't about your sprite.
For one, the "it's really bad" part isn't necessary, you're a beginner, it's completely fine if you're not a picasso. You try to walk, you stumble - you pcik yourself up and try again, having learned from the experience. We all were beginners at some point! I still have a lot to learn for myself.
For two, it'd be much appreciated if you would just use the regular font and wouldn't center everything. It makes your posts stick out in a weird way. These features are meant to be for special formatting of texts and not regular use in every single post.

Back to your sprite, you need more contrast, a lot more contrast! The blue is about fine, but red and skin still need colour work and your three yellow shades are really low on contrast.

First of all, I suggest dropping this weird format for your text; making it centered and with Courier New font doesn't make you more unique or easen our reading.

as for the sprite, the pose isn't that good. The original's pose isn't anatomically correct because of limitations and serve only for readability, so your sprite shouldn't be mimicking it. As for the colors, it looks too dull (as in, too gray) and the contrast is too harsh. Still, you're already away from simple brightness ramps newbie people tends to make, and you do seem to have a concept of hueshift, so that's great.

Sometimes, you don't need 3 shades per color, and you can even use shades from a color to shade other parts of the sprite. For example, Mario's skin tone and his red clothes can be shaded with same colors.

Finally, white will look better if shaded with a tinted gray; that is, a gray that hueshifts into some other color (red, blue, green etc). It all depends on the mood of your sprite.



here's my take on it, I also shuffled some pixels; I'd also do away with the black inside the sprite but I'll leave it to you.

It seems while I was making this, someone did pretty much the same thing I was.



As was just stated, saturation and hue-shift are very important when choosing colors, and many times
you can reuse colors already in your palette other places in your sprite.
If you look at my palette swatches, you'll see that certain colors link with others vertically, this indicates that
another ramp was formed with an existing color in my palette.

It helps me to think of colors in a palette as puzzle pieces instead of as steps in a ramp, I seem to have a
much easier time of finding the most appropriate color choices.

Oh sorry, it was just that I don´t like them like this, but I will do as you say (without Courier and not centered).

OK! i follow as you said so and heres what i did :_D. I picked "Kachua´s" Mario head because i liked it more... and later on im going to modify the body.

Trying new poses ! I forgot shading the shoes and some other parts from the new ones xD