It's cute. What help do you need with this?

Ransom, I have your message from practically a weekend ago open now lol.

Because this is so small I'm working pixel by pixel. Frankly I probably should had started larger to avoid that. Some parts look sharp while others look soft and swampy. I guess I'm not sure how to work small.

Well, it depends on personal style. Back when I made sprites for a game called Graal, I would typically only use three values: a mid-range one for normal lighting; a darker one for shadows; and then a lighter one for highlights, like shine in hair or something. Might add some extra shine in there when necessary, but that was the standard. The effect was a little like cell shading, and it worked for what I was doing.

I would make the outlines of characters and items in black, and then for the rest of the environment, I'd make their outlines in a darker but-not-quite-black shade of whatever colour they were. It created a subtle distinction between the environment and things that you could interact with. My outlines were also made a touch thicker and somewhat more cartoon-like by making sure pretty much all the black in the outline was connected.

I did the majority of my work in MS Paint back then, haha. I drew it at the size I intended it to be, but I just zoomed in a lot to do so. I think that's the easiest way to work, because you don't have to worry about resizing, or accidentally drawing outside of your exaggerated pixel grid.

I think simplicity is key with pixel art sprites, but again, it depends on your style.

precisely x_X it was meant to be vector but my version of flash is crap. I'm going for a simple painterly approach. Eventually I'll put my title screen on here to give people a better idea.
Pixel art is so fascinating to me but one of the most difficult thingssss

i think the problem is the fact that it doesnt look like pixel art, but if a low res painting is what they're looking for then ignore that. It kind of just looks resized (I know its not). Its not bad by any means though!

The color ramps are a little odd and i think they could be optimized and made a little more dynamic. The colors are a little too local is this for a game, and if so are there any hardware limitations?

A common thing in the pixel art community it to do edits for people and i could do one for you if you would like. i actually have a lot of questions about this before i can actually help you. would you like to chat over aim or something?

yeah it wasn't meant to be pixel art. I'm using SAI '3'

The game is going to be an iphone app. uhh let me get on aim. i dont do this often, haha