These aren't pixel art, certainly the background/shadow. But that's okay, if the work itself is good.

Sadly, the sprites themselves are messily made, have a lot of useless colors and blurry details, yet you kept very rough looking outlines and such. Why is the checkerboard of the knight not neatly on 2x2 or 3x3 pixels? Why are the lines on the pikeman's shirt like that? Why are the lines on the knight's shield (an inner detail) not anti-aliased, while the bow of the archer (an outer silhoutte) is?

Mixing techniques can allow you to use the best of both worlds, but it can also result in you getting the downsides of both.

They don't have to be the same size, but currently they're not following the shape of the character anyway. And right now each square is just a mess of many different colors.

By comparison look at this:


Which uses only 3 colors yet gives off a pretty neat checkerboard effect.

I mention a 3x3 pixels because what you currently have looks to be almost exactly on a grid that size, just not very cleanly.

It looks like at least some of your shadows are going to black. For example on the swordman's checkerboard shirt the shadows look wrong or dead to me. I think you're just adding more black to the shadows and this is why that effect is occurring.

Generally you want to nudge your hue as you shift from where the light source is hitting the object to where the object is in shadow. Shifting from a hue similar to the light source to a hue similar to the opposite, shadow color.

So if you have a yellow light, kinda the default light situation, you have shadows on the opposite side of the wheel, which give you purple.

I'm not a master of color, but I have found I get pretty good results if I take a base color, say orange, and shift to a higher Value yellow-orange in light and maybe a lower Value orange-red as I move toward shadow. I find this makes colors much more lively.

The thread I'm linking below has been very helpful to me regarding color. You can see in the syosa example that that artist takes all colors to the same purple shadow color. This is probably working because yellow light -> purple shadow. And this shared color seems to integrate all their colors. I tried a similar method recently and was pretty happy with the results.

http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=10695

The pixel board game I made using a similar all-to-purple scheme, assuming sunlight shining on the world:
http://www.pixeljoint.com/pixelart/90858.htm

If you have a limited color palette, maybe 4 Shades for each color, it's much easier to quickly edit these colors to find what pleases you than if you have a host of different colors, each of which must be changed individually.

I also think you could take a few more risks with your character base shapes. Your arms and legs seem very tubular, with little variation for anatomy or your own style flare. Maybe you could make the lower arms and legs very brawny, or give the characters disproportionate heads (such as Snader's examples) or tiny heads with muscley torsos. Maybe the peasants could be shrimpy, perhaps comically so if that was to your style, while the archers might be lithe and the swordmen very strong. Maybe fleas can be seen jumping away when the peasant scratches his head.

I like where your swordman is swinging his sword around in what could be a kind of dashing manner. You could experiment with blur frames if you want, which would mean having a frame or some frames when the sword is swinging quickly where the sword changes shape and connects two other frames to give an impression of quick movement.

I can't find an amazing example but this is kind of that sort of thing. As the sword comes forward the animator doesn't show the sword in each frame, but rather shows a blur of quick motion right before the strike.

http://www.pixeljoint.com/pixelart/88322.htm

Edited by Iscalio - 29 January 2015 at 4:36pm

Despite it being not pixel art it still looks very cool