tikal the echidna sonic advance style

[Iocus]

and what does TL;DR mean?

What E-man said. Basically, it's internet talk for "long story short" (at least when you're saying it about your own text, if somebody tells you "TL;DR", they mean that your text is too lengthy and they're not going to bother with it)

Your sprite is looking better already!

However, there are some things that I think you should address still. I've prepared a picture to illustrate:


The circles mark the areas which I think need revisions. The colors indicate the type of change required (I also added an edit of how I would approach this).

Red: I looked at some Tikal references, and it seems like that upper right corner of her head is much too round in your sprite, you ought to make it flatter and slanted, I'd say. Additionally, after pondering about it for a moment, I determined that that front dread sticks out too much for the angle she's facing, so you should push it back a pixel.

Green: Still have contrast problems on the yellow, but not because of it's not dark enough, but because it's not hue shifted enough. I'm not sure if you read the entry on the spriting dictionary as I suggested, but basically, a color like red is naturally darker than yellow, so when you pick your yellow's shades, they ought to tend to move towards red. Similarly, pure blue and purple are intrinsically darker than cyan, so your shades for cyan should have a tendency towards those colors. It might be a little advanced, but I hope that at least explains why I made those changes to your shades in my edit.

Cyan: I noticed a couple of inconsistencies with the lightsource.

Assuming your light comes, more or less, from where the yellow spot is. I've marked the areas where the shadows would move to that I feel you haven't accounted for (In retrospect, marking them with cyan wasn't the best idea...) Namely, the dreadlocks on the left should overlap, so the further one shouldn't be able to get light at the bottom right area. The head is overlapping the neck, so it should be darker, too. The front part of the foot catches light, while the shadows retract the to sides.

White: That pendant is still hard to see. Looking at the reference, I noticed that it covers a great area of her shirt, so I used some of that space to give it an outline.

I also gave the skirt's upper edge an outline to separate it better. There's a few other things, but that's the gist of it. I hope that helps.