thanks for the tips!  as you see im still very green in pixel art, hehe..

i will practice and keep that in mind ,

cheers! :)

I'd recommend checking out a lot of videos of wolves doing wolf things. While you can kind of get away with some knee bending action when it comes to animating idle cycles for humanoid bipeds, same theory can't be applied to wolves mainly because they have a different "mechanical structure" (I mean bones, tendons, general stance, the whole set). Even humans do not really bend their knees in spring-like bouncy fashion when being idle (please record a video if you see one doing so! ) - I guess that's just some sort of videogame animation convention that maybe came from programmers trying to do the animator's job in the early stages of computer game development. I have no idea about that. Anyways, wolves tend to lie down when being idle unless something's up (in which case they simply kind of stop being idle).

Also, a wolf wouldn't normally swing their tail up and down, but rather sideways, or simply keep it still in one of (around) ten positions based on what they're perceiving at that moment (fear, attentive behavior, etc...you can see the somewhat stressed wolf at 1'30'' keeping his tail down). When it comes to the ears, it's a similar story as the tail, so I won't repeat myself, but you got everything you need in the video I linked at the beginning to get started:

• Drop the bouncing legs.
• Keep the tail a bit lower than head's height, maybe swinging slowly from side to side (if he is focused on something or alert, tail will be rather still instead of swinging and with the base of their tail a bit higher compared to how it was before he got alerted, kind of making some jerky shape in its base if he feels things are about to get dangerous).
• Develop some subtle chest breathing animation.

I hope I'm not being too didactic but animals and animations are my two favorite things so when I saw your post I thought I'd share with you some of what I think would help me achieve this task.

I actually never animated wolves myself (other animals, yes) but I will try once I find some spare time :)

Please animate more animals!