Nick's Pixels'n'stuff

[triptych]

I'm here to officially announce the beginning of Princess Fantasy Catventure's production phase.
The gameplay will remain a secret; money could be made if done right (so stop spying >.> <.<). I still lack a programmer to do this in a portal-friendly language (so no Game Maker), which isn't strange seen the fact that I'm currently the only one working on it.
Concept art was made, some final designs can be seen on my (Cyber Maroon's) deviantart.
This is the main character, Princess Princess. She is out to find her kidnapped twin brother, Prince Neko, so she visits the many Kingdoms scattered around Fantasy World. Their rulers will assist Princess in-game.
Princess:

The name Neko might have given it away, but this is a spin-off of Bouncy Cat, with more human incarnations of Bouncy Cat characters, including Neko, Princess and Mao. The kingdom rulers are all inspired by my friends and former classmates. Princess is inspired by a good friend of mine who collaborated on Hazumu no Neko: Bouncy Cat.

hope you don't mind, i made a small edit to this sprite
don't worry though it comes with WAY TOO MANY WORDS so you can understand why i did things
at first i had just changed the colors because they seem to be working against your sprite more than anything. a cartoony style should have bright and 'cartoony' colors to match!

but then i noticed some areas that were bugging me, mostly around the face, i highlighted them here for you

none of these are anything huge, but there's enough of these little mess ups all over the sprite to really bring down the quality. basically, what you're doing in all of these areas (except for the one instance of the wonky lineart of the skirt) is trying to cram WAY too much into tiny spaces, and it makes everything look extremely busy and unreadable.
here's what it looks like after some quick edits to all of those problem areas. i also changed the colors around some more just because to be perfectly honest, all i did was up the saturation a ton to illustrate a point

everything looks much more readable with all those tiny problems out of the way! (although i kind of destroyed the face, oops)

basically, when using pixel art to make small sprites like this you need to make sure that everything is still completely readable - and to do that you need to use larger spaces than you may feel comfortable using

also, on the subject of some of the techniques you were using
banding (which is extremely visible around the ears in your version) is where you create bands of color that do nothing but make everything look blurry - look out for that, it's a big no no and drags down the quality of your work immensely

anti aliasing, while a useful technique to know, shouldn't be used as a crutch like you were using it. when using pixel art, you want to make sure your lineart looks good before doing anything else. all aa does it hide that problem and stops you from actually learning to improve your lines

selective outlining is the task of coloring your outlines so that they're brighter in areas that are affected by a lightsource. i would explain why this one is bad but
just
dont do this
dont do this until you know what you're doing, and even then don't do it
it looks bad a HUGE amount of the time because very few people actually use it correctly



anyways my giant post is over
if you don't feel like reading it, here's the alt text: abuh buh buh buh