Looking much better! You still have many areas of banding, for example on the left side of the left thigh (our left). I think it'd be a good exercise to go over the piece a few more times and suss out as many instances of banding as you can.

Although... I think your 3-tone shading is causing much banding. I would darken your two shadow tones, but then use the darkest one almost exclusively for AA, maybe--MAYBE--using it very sparingly here and there for deep shadows. Also, I'd probably make her skin tones more saturated and pinkish. It depends, though--what ethnicity is she supposed to be?

[MONDO EDIT]
I decided to pull your image into my pixel art program and analyze the palette. After deleting the old version, you had a total of 40 colors. Here's the palette:


(The bluish color is my background color; sort of a placeholder for transparency)

As I was cleaning it up I expected to find a lot of wasted/accidental colors, but in fact there were very few. You had one pinkish color used on the inside edges of each eye (I think on only 4 pixels total) which I replaced with a skin tone, and you were using a near-white color on the socks that was used nowhere else, again for only a handful of pixels. I replaced this with your existing white.

Lastly, you were using two almost identical grays to shade the eyes and the soles of the shoes. I merged these colors. Other than this one instance, you had almost no ramp mixing--by which I mean nothing shared colors with anything else. Let's take a look ay my cleaned up and very slightly optimized palette of 37 colors:


(shoes, socks/shorts, lips, skin, hat, shirt, eyes/soles/clothing trim, hair. The pure black used for the main outline is not pictured here, which is why you'll come up 1 short if you count.)

Easier to understand what's going on now. You have completely distinct ramps for everything, even the shirt and hat, despite them both being purely grayscale. There's not necessarily anything wrong with this. It definitely makes altering you coloring later easier. But it might be a beneficial exercise to experiment with ramp mixing and basic color optimization on your next piece. I think you'll find it creates cohesion and is generally easier to work with, once you get the hang of it.

However. Even if you don't mix your ramps, I think the number of colors used in individual ramps here is excessive and wasteful. For example, the lips take up only 56 pixels, less than an 8x8 canvas, yet they use 6 colors. Excessive. The shirt uses 4 shades, which could be justified, but the colors are so similar you really only see 2. Wasteful.

As for your color selection, I think in general you go too dark. Many of your ramps move way too quickly towards black, and they're also fairly desaturated. For a fun cartoon like this, brighter, more saturated colors would be appropriate. An edit to illustrate:


(slow animation; be patient)

Nothing but the palette was modified, and I made no further attempts to optimize. Note that I used no straight grays except for pure white and pure black, and the latter was only used for outlines. Grays are just not that interesting to look at. You can use really desaturated colors and still have the object seem gray, but it allows you to imbue it with some subtle emotion using color, and it makes it more interesting to look at.

For your skin tones, I cranked up the saturation several notches. Skin is very luminous. I found your brightness was about right in this case, but pretty much everywhere I else I had to dial it way up. I also moved around the color spectrum a bit more inside individual ramps. You can't do this much with a cartoon like this without breaking the style, but a little bit can help. Shift hue in addition to value is what I'm saying; it looks nicer.

Lastly, I'll point out that turning up the brightness has revealed some iffy shading that was formerly obscured. But hey, one thing at a time ;)

Edited by Hatch - 29 July 2009 at 9:47am