A new challenger approaches

[Level 1]

Bottom row looks like an edit of this.
Copying is good as a critical study to learn from, but it unfortunately doesn't seem to be the aim of your work.
It's one thing to use other people's work like prefabs, but it's another for it to work effectively. In most cases it ends up as a displaced splice because it's out of its original context, and doesn't work as well as where it was originally intended for.
Ask yourself questions like "why was it done like this?" "what does it express?" "how is this effective?" "how did this person do this" etc. and from there try to answer those with studies and work, which will lead you onto other questions.

The bottom row was already explained a few comments posts back in the thread. I scrapped the character in order to try and create a new and more original character, actually, the knight I posted up yesterday is the result of that. So the boxer is out, and the knight is in. I understand now that using references is fine, but copying the work directly is wrong, unless it's used for study purposes only, which is what I explained in the character with fire in it's hands, that was just a study on how to create a sprite with a limited palette, and I was also trying to learn how to showcase fire with an effective, and appealing look. As of the Scarf character, I want to try to use it for animation purposes (Battle idles, running, attacking etc.), the knight character, well like I said before I want to create a new character with something that I have never tried before, that being metal, for that, I used a metal pen as a reference (I know, it's not the best but it's what I had at the time).