I think the background color should be something brighter (or hotter). It's a cool, simple piece but overall the colors seem a little bland. Also I'm not sure I like the ground being the same light gray as the troll. If you made the ground dark blue then made the sky a bright blue or a purple it might look much better. It'll show off the characters more.
Bah, this is ssssooo fantastic!! What a big difference, so smoooooth! I know what you mean with the AA though, I still have to watch myself to make sure I don't go on a crazy AA frenzy XD This is wonderful, deffs something you should feel good about!
I originally limited it to only two colours to try to get rid of my habit of anti-aliasing everything whether it was necessary or not, but I suppose you're right.
I wouldn't say it's fantastic, I've still far to go before I can say that about any of my works, but thank you; I am quite flattered.
If you added a low saturated blue/purple-y color, just the one, you could AA the edges and it would go from fantastic to wonderfully fantastic :D
Thank you.
Do you have any suggestions for improving it without increasing the number of colours? I considered adding some texture or dithering, but felt that would make it look too busy. I could be wrong about that, though.
Imo, there's still a lot of stuff you could add to techincally improve this, but it still has it's own little charm. I like it!
I might prefer the 2-color version ;)
The little people are awesome, very efficiently and elegantly pixeled.
The troll linework doesn't work as well IMO, it's not consistent with the people. I wonder if it would be possible to suggest its volumes by blocking out large areas of shadow (I tried and failed).