My First Sprites[Feedback Wanted]

[Rosencrantz]

Some very blatant problems I see are the colors. You're trying to jam in a whole lot of colors into a small area, and the colors have very poor contrast between them; you might as well just scrap the extra colors and keep them solid shades (like with the two darker grays on the knight and the two dark tones on the clothes and skin on the soldier). Actually, with sprites that small, you probably don't even need more than two shades per color to get a nice effect.

The dog's probably the best out of the group, and I love the pose on it. Everything else has some problems, though; for the book, try to visualize a 3D rectangular prism instead of keeping it a complete rectangle. The knight's just a solid mass of iron; split up his features, and fix those shoulders (the solid black shoulder guards don't work with that thing). The soldier's pretty nice-looking, but see if you can't make the arms longer. I'd excuse the heightened belt, but you really need to fix how you're coloring the clothes since they're just a garbled mess right now (especially the pants). Diogalesu up there linked to the Final Fantasy sprites, and they're all really good for showing how sprites this small should be shaded.