Finished tree

Some sprites I did, first I've done in that resolution.

Because so I'm looking for critiques, advice on design, colours, style(Which look best out of those two, or other palettes I could try). What to do to these to really make them look good.

Yes... they are highly influenced by SoM sprites, I love the sprites in that game... anyways.

Advice?

Small edit:

NEW STUFF:

Not bad...

But the contrast seems to be off... Their chest and right arms get lost in the haze.

Otherwise it looks great...

Messing around with different pallettes. Also tried to adjust the shoes.

Started working on the tree, I'm really bad at them, so I could really use some advice. One has some bright highlights, one doesn't. Which looks better?

Looks a little like the tree I'm workin on... Personally, I think the circles turned out to be a bad idea. Unless you want a cartoonish look, in which case they work awesome.

The faces of your little dudes could use a little more definition, if that's even possible.

Well I didn't want to go for a completely realistic look as it becomes way too hard to pull off in the end for me. I want to go for a semi-realistic, while having a cartoonish feel that hopefully wraps up nicely in the end. Sadly I can't add anymore definition to the face, there's really no space in it left to do anything with it. About the tree trunk, I'll try to do something with it, but having a 32 pixel width doesn't really make it easy to define any abnormalities with the trunk without it looking terribly weird, as I have tried. I'll try to redo the tree. You'd be surprised how hard it is to find a nice tree reference...

Nope, I wouldn't. Be surprised, that is.

That's why you go to the nearest available park. And we have a few trees in the PixelJoint gallery, they're good to look at, if you can track them down.

Ah, completely missed the question at the bottom of one of your posts. The highlighted tree looks vastly better.

Here is the finished tree, or I think it's finished:

I'm actually not happy with the shading much really.

You could go to Kon's website, finalredemption or something like that. He has a great tree on the front page.

On with your tree, some of the leaves look a little like scales, or at least not like leaves, and the entire think looks somewhat like an icecream scoop because of the circles. Circles can work, I've seen some good trees done that way, but this one is just one big one with many more small ones at the bottom. try to vary the size of the circles a little more. The shading is pretty well done, the highlights are pretty effective. The trunk could maybe use a little more contrast between the darker colors, because it looks like one color for two. It might just be my moniter, but I just though I should say that. The highlight on the trunk makes it look a little plastic, but still looks nice.

Good job overall, just some things to work on.

Edit: Also, are the guys walking? It looks a little like they are, and whether they are or not, the shoulder in the back looks a little too high. Also, the blue hair doesn't look too great, but that might just be that I don't like blue hair.

The tree's almost there, but it still needs a bit, I think. The smaller circles on the right probably would have little to no light on them, especially the higher of the two. Try darken those up a little and it should start looking a little less odd.

As for the trunk, it just needs to drop some of the symmetry. Take out the existing roots and add some that aren't at 90s or 45s of the base. Tapering off the trunk as it goes up would be wise, as would adding evidence of branches, or at least irregularities of some kind.