I need advice please

[tancho-koi]

Hi, I am relatively new to making sprites and so use references to create some.
So I made some sprites I plan to use for a (free) game: it's Link. However, I wonder if my sprites look too much like their references. So here are some of the sprites I made:

I used pokemon sprites and minish cap sprites as references, is it obvious? Do they look more like recolors than originals?
(here are links if you want to compare)
Minish cap sprites
Pokémon sprites

If you find other things that look wrong with him and want to point it out, I'd be glad to hear your critique and advices!
Thank you very much!

[RétroX]

Firstly, the palette is really, really bad. No offense, but you didn't really do very well as far as colour choice goes. Choose a different shade of green, and choose a slightly more orange/brown yellow.

Secondly, you appear to be shading the sprite as if it's flat. Link is 3D, and when you shade a hat like it's a pointy box, it doesn't really look like it. Using an extra shade of each colour might also help tremendously; I don't recommend using more than that, but one more would seriously help. We're not on a GBA, and we're not limited to a certain number of colours per sprite.

Lastly, the animations need a lot of work (although I'm certainly not the person to ask on that), and "flipping" which leg is lit up from the side usually isn't enough to tell the person looking at it that the legs are actually moving.


The sprites, overall, need a lot of work, but I think that you'll get there with a bit of help.

[tancho-koi]

Thanks for the advices! I am glad you are frank with me. I guess my color choice is bad because I usually work with with bigger pictures and non-sprites, so I'm going to get a few tutorials about that. (I guess sprites don't go well with too dull colors and low contrast)
I'll also study more sprites shading and look at sprites animation for the walk and I should certainly redo him! I guess I overdid the gba style.

Thank you again, your advices are very helpful!