The VG Resource

or maybe some kind of piratey swashbuckler. Yo ho ho, and a bottle of C&C

His hand (the one not holding the sword), face, feet and legs look extremely strange. For one thing, clothing doesn't usually hug that tightly to the skin, it looks less like he's wearing torn trousers and more like he's spray painted himself orange. There is also a lot of black when there doesn't need to be, and thus your shading is totally pointless. Shading can do the job (and do it better) that you're making your black lines do. Especially at this size, black lines are ugly and make everything very messy. What you've done is drawn the entire shape with an outline, and almost applied shading as an afterthought. Shading is not something you just add at the end, it's an integral part of the sprite and gives everything depth and volume. A lot of your shading doesn't do this, and seems to be there just for the sake of being there.

one thing taht I want to add, though, is that the muscles are much better than your first attempt at it. Just ditch the black lines and use shading to your favor.

I suggest drawing this on a big scale, collect crits, and then return to the pixelart and base it off your drawing.

In case you want to use it, here is an edit in which I increased the contrast in the hair and tweaked it slightly, reduced the darkness in his abdominal lines, and edited the sword.

Moving forward?

Not really. The trousers possibly look a little better, but also messy, now. You haven't really fixed the chest at all. There's nothing wrong with a black outline, but there IS something wrong with using outlines to define the shape of your sprite. All you've done is change the colour of your outline to something less readable...