pointless sprites

[Chris2Balls [:B]]

brandman, you're doing a good job giving criticism and such, but as metaru said, you also have to say why.
and illustrating your words with an edit can be quite helpful too.
you're also being very judgmental without necessarily backing up what you're saying, ie:

Well the body poses are messed up, which therefore causes the completed ones to look very strange, and I'm almost sure you wanted those body poses like that so I left it alone.

anyway.

right: what is the grinning colossus exactly? a cylinder with a mouth and eyes? if it is a cylinder, then think in three dimensions: for now, it looks like a bullet shaped strip, like this:

this is because of the strips of shading on each side of the sprite.
one easy way of fixing this is to add more intermediate shades between the light and medium values, maybe also adding a backlight.
another would be to change the light source, to something more ambient, to make your life less complicated!

here's a list of tries i've made:


i'm not very good at conveying volume on cylinders, especially as i haven't had any practice. i'd recommend you look for some references for something more consistent.
i hope i've helped and given some ideas on how to improve!

oh and you could add in a tiny, tiny bit of colour in the palette or as a discreet secondary lightsource, to spicen things up... up to you