It's small I know but it's for a Pocket PC so they have to be small. It's way cartoony and so I'm looking for suggestions to make it look better. I plan to have 5 to 7 in total. I wanted it to have the feel that your looking down on it from a 60 degree angle like the pic below (from dune II a way cool old school game)

Can someone give me some pointers on how to make my ship look better and or hints for future ships?  Also,  it took me 4 hours to do this. Does it take normally that long to do art work or does it start to go faster when you know what you're doing?

 

P.S. If there is anyone willing to spare me the pain of figuring out how to draw I'd love to give credit to whomever can draw some 24x24 pixel ships

 

The harvester looks quite nice and aside from the aforementioned I have no criticism for it. The ship, however, is a problem. Mainly the issue I see there is that the lightest grey sticks out among the rest of the ship, which is too dark for me to be able to "read" the image well. So fix the palette there. It's also a bit lacking in the area of details, and the outline makes it look like it's from a different game than the harvester. Another thing that's a good general rule is to not use pure greys. Use very desaturated colors (similar R, G, and B values) but not pure greys (R=B=G) because pure greys are very lifeless and hard to use. Greys are, however, great for making transitions between colors in ramps. A ramp is a set of colors from light to dark that is used for shading objects with a particular visible color. For example, your harvester has a red ramp with all your shades of red as well as a grey ramp for the treads and shadow. Greys can be used to make ramps that shift drastically in hue: instead of simply going Bright Green-Medium Green-Dark Green, one might want to have a second lightsource like a streetlight that illuminates part of the shadowed areas of some green object. So the ramp would be changed to Bright Green-Medium Green-Dark Grey-Medium Orange-Bright Orange.

 

But I'm not really an expert as much as some people are; if you really want to learn about color choice, I suggest reading this topic.