Faeldspr's Top-Down Sprites

[Bombshell93]

first things first, your pallet, I'd advise 3 colours,
background tone, light tone, lightest tone.
make mini fountain-like shape in your light tone and highlight those shapes with your lightest tone,
think subtlety, too small and it'll just look like noise, too big and it'll just look silly.
grass may seem simply but it can be a massive pain in the bum, if you can't get the grass to look like grass you'd be best defaulting to a recurring pattern to represent the grass (see pokemons tilesheets, they use 3 dots in 2 locations and get away with it pretty well)