Sprite shading help

[Delta Nite]

Hi there! I just tried my hand at pixel art for the very first time.

I wanted to make a Blastoise sprite equivalent to the Charizard on Firered's titlescreen and Venusaur on Leafgreen titlescreen

These two I'm referring to:

Spoiler:

I changed Charizard's pallet to blue and got this:

Spoiler:

Using Crystal's Blastoise sprite, I ended up with this guy (my first try at spriting so don't be mean :<):

So now I want to shade it on the same style as Charizard and Venusaur, but I don't have a clue on how to do this. Also, I'm kinda colorblind, so working with such a limited pallet is very hard for me.
Do you guys have any tips on how to apropriately shade it ?

 

[Nina]

The first thing you need to know is that all hue value shifts are not equal! The charizard's overall values are darker than venusaur's, so simply shifting it over to blue doesn't always help! It's better to shift from venusaur's, but even then it might need some adjustment.

Like Johnny said, there are a lot of tutorials that will help you with shading! More than we could begin here! However, if it helps a bit with trying to assign values from a multicolor pokemon into a monocromatic pallet, you can always turn image black and white and apply color to them to try and get a better feeling of what hues might end up like, even see if their shading can help you out a little bit. (The light direction is coming from the top left, like in the other two images!)

 

[Delta Nite]

Thanks for the answer and for the pallet advice! I'm starting to think my Blastoise is just too big compared to Charizard and Venusaur... I'm gonna try and remake it smaller. Is the lineart on this one good and I should simply resize it and clean the lines or should I start over from scratch?

 

[Nina]

Thanks for the answer and for the pallet advice! I'm starting to think my Blastoise is just too big compared to Charizard and Venusaur... I'm gonna try and remake it smaller. Is the lineart on this one good and I should simply resize it and clean the lines or should I start over from scratch?

If you have a program that allows you to resize line without having them blur, you can always resize and clean up! If it doesn't, you can still use it as a base to start over from.