Spark's Sprites

[SparkMouse]

Calcifer's portrait is obviously blurred, there's too many shades going on. Do it with a limited palette, or else he'll clash with the others' levels of detail.

Calcifer's portrait was actually made in Photoshop with a very thin brush tool so that I could use some transparency in the flames (except for his facial features, which were made with the pencil tool). I do agree it doesn't really match the other characters because of this, but I'm not really sure how to make his portrait look good using pure pixel art.

Princess Mononoke is actually a lot taller than Porco Rosso, if you aren't aware. She is in a crouched position, and if she was standing normally, she'd be taller or same height than Baron.

The heights provided are the heights of the sprites themselves, not specifically the characters (and the bottom of the height reference is the plane on which people would stand, so some characters' feet or toes go slightly past it). Since Mononoke is in a crouching position, if I sprited her standing up she would indeed be about Baron's height, as you say.

Kiki's portrait looks weird. Her facial features aren't evenly placed.

Could you give some specifics? Just in case, here's the reference I used.

Maybe your problem here is not imitating Miyazaki's style. It looks like his drawings, honestly. Your problem, though, is trying to port it in a different media with the same techniques. Pixelart is a low-resolution art media, so along with colored outlines, you should use anti-alias to smooth out the lines to make it look like a real drawing. Anti-alias doesn't occur in drawings because it's a traditional, high-definition art. But when working with small pixels, you need to use additional techniques to ensure the smoothness. I'll make a sprite of Kiki to exemplify what I'm trying to say.

I'd very much appreciate an example of anti-aliasing for the outlines. I tried to anti-alias the shading on the original Totoro base, but decided not to use any anti-aliasing on the newer one because I didn't use it on the shading for the other characters either.

I know I said this kinda late but don't worry, as this can be fixed with some minor edits here and there. My sprite might not be ideal either; it's just showing how I'd make her. You can ignore it, but it'd be cool if you studied it for techniques.

Help is always appreciated. This is more a test for me than anything; challenging myself to get better at custom sprites, especially humans. I definitely don't have the hang of it yet, and with any luck I'll be much better once I get around to making these sprites into animations (could be quite a long while depending on how my current projects go).