An excercise in spriting

[Gors]

the problem in this style is not the number of shades, which I find adequate. But there's too many stray pixels and this hurts readability.



Looking at the left side of this sprite, you see that the has those dark pixels at every corner. That's called sel-out, and it's ok to use that, but leaving stray pixels is not.

check this sprite you made yourself:



here, her legs don't look as grating because selout still looks like an outline from afar. That's how correct seliout should be: seamless, but still there. That improves your drawing area and doesn't leave out stray pixels. In other words, you don't 'place pixels' in pixelart. You place pixel clusters, for a single pixel cannot naturally represent a thing.