You're a pretty neat little pixel artist, you struggle a little in shading though, not much, but a small bit. Notably
here, the ends of the talons feel flat due to being basic colour and outline (a strong one at that). If you lighten the outline a bit on the end of the talons such as
here, you might get a bit more flow and better colour transition. Also the talons may need some anti-aliasing before the outline, depends on how dark you make it. Also there's not a great need to add one pixel width shadow under the talon on the body there either, it's not very noticeable but borders on pillow shading a small bit. You should practice lighter outlines in general though, especially on the clown fish in your latest. I'm not much of a sprite artist myself, so I'm not sure how much I can help other than those few suggestions, but your drawing ability is carrying over nicely so far, who knows, keep it up and I might need to nab you for Phoenix Rising ;]
Hi Gav. :)
They're bows, by the way, not talons. I'll admit Sylveon is hard to define, but it's certainly not a bird of prey. Anyway, I do partially agree with you, though I have my reasons. I don't know if you can tell, but I actually used the color of the dark blue strip on the bow to outline the lightest part. I did that because I got lazy, unfortunately. It was the last part I worked on. What I have a hard time with though, which you touched on, is determining where the dark outlines should be. I don't want outlines to be considered the "walls" of a pixel piece. They should be a part of it, you know? But I often find myself not zooming out as much as I should, aha. Mostly what I'm doing is experimenting, as I find that my works like
this, are outlined far too lightly. Unless I've been doing it wrong the whole time lol.
Now, as for the fish, bare with me. The reason why I made the outline and all interior points of the clown fish black is because of the black spot on the middle fish. It drew your eye in far too much, but I wasn't willing to compromise and make it lighter, because of the darker fish in the background. So, I added more points of black to spread it out a bit. Unfortunately, that takes away from the others, so I guess I'll lighten everything up.
Dear, you know me. I'm always willing to help you. Consider me a part of your team on a need-by-need basis. <3 Oh, and thanks for the critique. :)