General Spriter's Showcase!

[SassySnivy]

I downsized the Sugimori art, like, a lot and then pixeled it over to make this litleo sprite! @Speed-X I would LOVE your criticism. (You criticise because you care. ;D XD) I can't quite figure out what else I need to do.




~SF.

SO YES, I finally have some time. I'll do this in list form.

• First off, it's best that you not use pure black if you plan on making the image transparent. It makes it more inconvenient for copying and pasting and the like. Also, I'd try not to use pure black anyway, if I were you: maybe, if not a dark, dark grey, you can try--in this instance--a very dark orange-ish red. Also, good for you for not using pure white, either. You shouldn't use pure black or white unless you really need to. With how dark you want the "black" color, it all depends on what you're going for. Same with the hue / lightness of the "white" color, if you have one.
• The color count is 18. Wow. Let's take a look at this!
  Firstly, your pink colors are a bit redundant. Just try using the reds, they work just fine. Also, the pink areas are such a small space anyways, that the difference isn't terribly noticeable; that, and the open mouth actually stands out more with the red. So that's two colors eliminated, which leaves us at 16. Let's further see how we can optimize it!
  You made the tan cross into the black fur, which is good. It's good to find some way to cross your color ramps. Your darkest red color also isn't needed: up the contrast of your darkest dark gray a tad (by making it darker) and you can use it to replace the dark red.
  Speaking of which, your reds could also use more contrast. Go with making the light red a little lighter.
  Okay, so we also have a couple of other problem areas: your two darkest tan colors. Use the darkest one for BOTH colors and make that shade a little darker. Bam! No contrast problems, and especially no redundant colors. We're already down at 13 colors!
  I found another problem area that I think was mistakenly kept: your darkest gray has a shade slightly lighter, used at the bridge of the nose.
• Try using some anti-aliasing between the top of the closest eye and the black fur.
• I see you're using selective-outlining, but try avoiding broken sel-outing, which is making it incompatible on a darker-colored background. Let me show you something.
  
  See how you have some lighter pixels at the line segments? On a darker background, it clashes, looking too noisy. And this is a bad habit to break: I've been struggling with it for a while now, but I've tried to become more aware of what I've been doing. While I know that you're going for your own shading style, take some sprites from the Pokemon DS games. Put them all on a darker background. Hardly any of them have compatibility problems with darker backgrounds. What you should do is finish the sprite, then compare what it looks like on a dark and light background and tweak it so that it looks appealing on either.

I made all the aforementioned changes on this edit, along with some miscellaneous ones.

With all this in mind, try going over your Pyroar and see if you find any similar slip-ups and such. :>

I will mention, though, you went a little crazy with the number of colors on Pyroar. 21. With a lot of them, you could instead up the contrast on some areas and that would fix the need to add extra, unnecessary buffer colors. You use GG, right? Do you have the preview window set at all, by your colors and layers and etc (mine is at the top-left-ish)? It's very helpful. It seems that maybe you only focused on what they looked like while you were zoomed in instead of zoomed out. It's important that you know how it looks and how you want it to look while it's zoomed out, because x100 zoom is the size that pixel art is meant to be appreciated at. If you use too many shades for one color, it will look blurry and appear as if the contrast is low. Contrast is a really important element of pixel art; keep an eye on it! :>