fire emblem mug splices

[Nindo]

Without sounding like a major jerk, this sort of thing is not teaching you anything but bad anatomy and how to completely avoid actually considering what a Fire Emblem style sprite is.

From hear on in, I refer to each sprite by it's numbered descending order.
On The Generalities:
All of these suffer from bad splicing of the hair, but sprites 2, 4, 5, 7, and 8 are the most blatant examples of this. It is quite plain that these hairstyles do not belong to these people's heads via the lack of proper shading. It's like you switched people's hair without thinking about how the hair plays to their head. The anatomy issues are also plaguing these sprites. The same thing goes for the anatomy of the head in relation to these bodies, the lack of proper shading betrays a lack of understanding of how bodies work. Also, you are mixing different generations of Fire Emblem sprites, which is one of the reasons Sketchasaurus found the desaturation of the second sprite, and if you ask me the fourth sprite, at least the bottom half of it.

On The Specificities:
I am fairly familiar with this style/source and these "edits" are not doing the original any justice. On 1, it's quite plain that the woman's head is on a male's body, and you tried to remedy this, but all you did was make the back of the neck look awfully weird and make it look like the character is overweight, which the thin-ness of the face does not betray. The first sprite where you used Canas' head you can tell where the monocle used to be by the shading that was originally there to show how it rested in front of his right eye. If I'm not mistaken on that one, the body is from Marcus, and as such the pale, frail head does not match the body type at all that the armor and body shape below belie. Three is not too bad, but I think that is mostly because it required the least "modifying" on your part. The head and body actually share a similar body type on this one, so that's good. There is a bit of readability issues going on with the neck area, it really looks like the head was just pasted onto the body. I'm going to skip four and address it with 7 and 8 since they are all the worst of the bunch. Five isn't too bad, it looks like you took the head of a bandit and put it on an archer, that's about it. The hair is pretty bad on this one. Six is like three, the overall body types match, though again it doesn't look like you had to do too much with this one to make it work. Since you didn't remove the monocle, Canas head looks fine, and you recolored the hair, that's about it.

Now for the worst of the bunch, but interestingly enough, the most important of the sprites here. Four, seven, and eight are the worst of the bunch here, and I think I know why. These are the ones that you put the most work into, and that's good. Please, don't misunderstand me here, yes they are the worst, but they are also the one's that YOU put them most effort into. I can see that you actually tried on these, which is the most important thing here. If you want to learn the style, simply splicing and recoloring doesn't teach you anything about the specific style, you have to get in there, and mess around. Get a feel for what makes a Fire Emblem sprite, a Fire Emblem sprite. You actually stepped out of the comfort of essentially doing/learning nothing and wasting your time, to making your mark on these sprites. Alright, got that? Good, because you made a lot of mistakes. Four, seven, and eight all have crippling anatomy and shading issues. Look at the faces for all of these, do they seem right to you? I mean, they shouldn't. Seven, if I'm not mistaken, is Franz's head with a pasted on beard and a giant nose. Again, I like that you are actually messing with the sprites here and getting dirty, but that nose looks like a giant pyramid on him, encroaching way too much on the right side of his face. His eyes are heavily un-leveled, i.e. one is lower than the other. That beard is clearly spliced in and the facial shading does not match. I mean I know I sound like a broken record just saying that everything "looks pasted" but please, please analyze this statement and then analyze these sprites. Ask yourself, "how can I make is so this isn't merely pasted on, but an actual feature of the face?". You've got a myriad of examples in the Fire Emblem sprite-base, just take your time and analyze them. Four looks a bit inhuman, his head is really oblong, thin but very tall. The hair does not imply the forehead on this sprite. Both of these issue combined make the person look like they were born with some kind of defect. The lower half of the sprite (Callach? I believe) is positioned in such a way that it doesn't make sense for the face to be looking as forward as it does with a lack of movement on the part of the neck, which hasn't been shown on the neck of this sprite. For eight, you have hair going one way, the face looking another, and the body still implying a third direction. The head looks too pushed back in relation to him having the body of a knight class from that game. Above his left eye is what looks like a very dark, thick eyebrow, but I see nothing of the sort above the right eye. If it's not an eyebrow, but a scar, then the problem is that it looks too much like hair (too dark and too fuzzy). His eyes also are implying to different views, with the left eye that far over, we should see less of the right.