i luv it so mucho!!!! tanks!!!! ^_^

You're welcome! I'm glad you like it. :)

I think you might be an undiscovered pixel artist :) I meant to comment that the foot was really good, and that I hadn't achieved decent shading like that even when trying. Of course, I'm learning it's obvious how much interest people have in certain subjects by the time evidently taken on them :)

Pixel art appears to be something I can actually sort of do, since it lets me slow down and edit things on a much more detailed level--even if I can't draw a line, I can decide whether this one pixel should be here or one space over and down. It actually feels more like writing (which is also something I can actually sort of do) because of the ability "proofread" individual (word/pixel) choice to bring out the best overall product I can make.

Shading has always been my major weakness and the main reason my non-pixel visual art never really rose to the ranks of not-horrible. With the pixel icons, I'm noticing that my biggest shortcoming appears to be with the wide-open spaces. I can at least make up and improvise some basic shading (that I'm sure isn't even close to accurate to someone who actually knows lighting/color theory but at least looks passable to everyone else) near the borders and edges of things, but once that wears off then I'm left with very little idea of what to do in the middle. It's kind of hard to tell because I use very similar colors, but if you look very closely (and your color vision permits) at the outermost/rightmost shell segment in this icon and the topside of the foot in that one, you may see how I took one the intermediate highlight color (the one in-between the brightest and most obvious highlight color and the actual non-shaded "normal" color) and made a patch that expands to cover almost half the area. For areas of this size, it's sort of a passable kludge to make it look shaded, but probably not the best solution ever and even that might not work if it gets too much bigger, who knows. (And as for the snail body itself in this one, I just sort of left it as-is because the bright fire truck red body happens to look okay without requiring too much shading too deep into the middle areas anyway.)

That may actually be why I think my personal icon looks better in lower resolution (with each "pixel" being 3x3) than it would have if I had used the 2x2 pixels of the foot icon and now this.

Still, I definitely think that, due to the "what do I do in the middle" problem, the shading on my pixel icons looks better the smaller and more constrained an area is. The eyestalks/antennae are probably my favorite parts of this one, and the claws are probably my favorite part of the foot one.

I have great difficulty with that middle part as well - shading as if light's coming from the top left is habit to me now, but texturing is... a mystery, and I've no idea what to do on large sprites such as large pieces of machinery for bosses. At least in that situation, I can usually end up just throwing in a heap of invented detail, such as on http://www.clickteam.info/davidn/ct.....s2-cleaner.png (most of which I forgot would actually be obscured in the actual game, in this case).

When in doubt, throw more detail on there, because that gives you more edges to work with and shade from! I like the way you think.