A new challenger approaches

[Rosencrantz]

Well, my two cents isssssss that you're confusing the definition of "reference" a bit.

See, the thing that was happening here is that you're carbon-copying your references rather than trying to scrap together something that's 100% yours. The idea of references is that they're meant to show you how lighting works, how the coloring works, how the thing's physically supposed to be formed, etc., but not how to make the thing itself!

The best way to improve is to try and do it without bases. Do it from a blank canvas and use your references to see how something should be shaped, how something should be colored, and all that. If you get it wrong, you get it wrong, no big deal. Learn where you went wrong and fix it! Then just keep molding your piece until you finally get something where you aren't catching the problems, and then bring it to some of the rest of us here to help you make it better.

Don't use a base sprite and build on top of it; that's going to result in this kind of stuff happening in this thread. Create your own base and go from there. You've gotten a pretty good grasp of how this stuff works already, so open up a blank MS Paint canvas and get to work!!






Also the knight's pretty grand so far; liven it up a bit with some additional rotations (make the crown rotate clockwise to continue fitting on his head, have the arms straighten out during the frames when he's rising, and have the upper legs bend some more during the falling) and you've got something good there.