The VG Resource

dithering on a curved surface like that pipe needs to be a lot more gradual, as is its taking away from the shades you whipped up and making them each look like its own fuzzy region.
Also under the lip of the pipe should be only 2 dark shades, naturally light is what adds up not shadow, so a much more occluded space like under the lip would not have as dynamic a range of light that could reach it hence it could be expressed in fewer colours, as is it looks like its a pinch in the pipe rather than a shadow.
Also a tip with contrast (your pipes contrast is okay but this applies to everything else) your darkest will always be darker than you expect, its a good rule of thumb when starting, due to the nature of pixel art taking advantage of fewer colours its always a good Idea to make each shade useful in itself, mid-shades get in the way and you can usually get by without them.

Thank you for the advice, Bombshell. I'll see how I'll be able to use it in the future.

Anyway, instead of showing my most recent changes on my sprite sheet, I am just going to move onto the animation. Since the Mushroom doesn't move much (if you'd like a jiggle effect to it, I'll see what I can do), I only animated the Fire Flower and the Star.







While animating the Fire Flower was easy enough, the Star was a major pain to to make it look right. Not only did I have trouble with the highlight in the eyes, but getting the arm to look right at the side was an unpleasant experience. If you see anything i could do to improve it, I'm all ears!

on the fire flower, when the head of the flower reaches the far right or far left, add an extra frame of the flower moving a shorter distance, it should make it seem like the flower is slowing down before bobbing back the other way and it will make the animation feel more fluid.

I really like that star. the shading is very consistence.

Thank you for the advice on my animation, Bombshell. I already took it into effect and made two variations. Which one should I go with?





By the way, I hope you don't find this offensive, but I would like to leave the current shading on my Star and Fire Flower alone. From a distance, they don't look too bad as they already are and applying the darkest shade from my palette bar would not do any good. I hope you aren't insulted by this decision I made.

I'd say the first animation is smoother, you could cut down on frames depending on your requirements, but as a whole, well done

the only "problem" is that the flower's animation path is making an 'angle' instead of a curve. Some position edits would make this animation better but overall that's nice

The flower's design doesn't really help but you should avoid banding when shading.

Thank you for the additional amount of help, guys! I just updated my sheet, so let's see if there are new things to correct on this!



Please excuse the shoddy Mario sprite and the Luigi sprite. I only used them to compare the general size of my sprites. Got any ideas on how to improve the shading on the spring board? The beveled bit at the top of each orange platform concerns me a little.


Corrected Fire Flower sprite


Vine

p.s. What do you mean by "The flower's design doesn't really help," Gors? Is there something funny about the general shape of the Fire Flower?

He's talking about the banding. The flower is made in.. well.. bands so it's difficult to get around banding.

Yeah, he wasn't too clear about that statement, so I was assuming he was talking about something else in addition to the banding. When I corrected the animation for my Fire Flower the second time, I addressed that issue the best I could. For something as slender as the Fire Flower stem, it was really difficult to get rid of it. Even the vine was a pain to eradicate banding, so if you see any shading problems with them, could you please point them out clearly?

By the way, got any suggestions on how to improve the shading on my spring board before I go ahead and animate it?

there is no blatant banding on those sprites, it really is hard to fix all instances of banding in some sprites. Principally things like ropes, vines or anything that is in bands, as virt pointed out

now, i dont really like how the star is smaller than other items, usually they're abut the same size, but depending on how you use them they might be fine.

Sounds good! I already took care of the issue involving the Star size into account. Having to recreate the Star from the side was even more stressful than last time, but I think what I have works.




Now I'm almost thinking that I should modify the size of my vine. Is it fine as it is?

One more thing, though. I never got any feedback on my Spring Board. Are there any tweaks I need to do to the shading to make it look better?



The beveled circle is what I am attempting to do for the top of each orange platform. The white highlight is giving me the most trouble. Any suggestions?

I think the bottom part of the spring's top platform part should be rounded, and you should go with the left one.

I actually went with that design choice in the first place because I thought it would give my spring board a unique touch to it, but I'll go with your suggestion.

Anyway, I'm working on the animation right now. These are the squash and stretch poses I've chosen. Got any advice on how to make them look better?

Hmm... I don't see a whole lot of activity going on my my sprite topic, so I hope you guys don't mind that I double post to bring this up to speed.

It took me a while, but I finished the frames for my spring board. See anything that looks weird? If so, can you show me what I need to do? Otherwise, I'll just move onto other things.