Hey all. I'm new here, but I've been working on flash games for about 4 years now.

Some of the projects I've done are Plague of Altera, Gear Hero, and The Little Viking. I mainly do 2d art as a hobby with a programming friend of mine.

Currently we're working on a pretty large scale RPG similar to that of final fantasy. I don't want to post too much art at once, so as I get advice I'll post a little more. Please note, I don't have a tablet so all of this art is done with the mouse. Also try to keep the criticism within the bounds of this art style.

Let me know what you think, and tell me what I could improve on! What I will post first is the 4 main characters to the RPG. Another thing, my color theory is pretty aweful (from what i've been told). If anyone has some suggestions for colors I could swap for these characters let me know.

The mage and paladin type characters look great, I might explore some more diversity in armor design for the sake of color, lots of grey going on there. The swordsmen looks like he saw an old man fall off a bike. Not so much angry as a "yikes" and the rogue looks like he's smelling something unfortunate. Unless that's what you were going for ;D

haha! Well I suppose I need to elaborate a bit. In this RPG there will be roughly 6 different face expressions per character. The armor design is lacking due to this being their first "set" of armor. I want to try to convey that the player is literally left with nothing but some old leather armor, and will progress into better sets as he completes quests.

The mage and pally have nice sets because the player will not meet them till later in the game. I'll probably touch up on the pally's starting set though. I've always been pretty bad when it comes to colors especially for a medieval/fantasy setting. My brain keeps telling me to use dull colors for medieval/low level armor.

Thanks for the comment!

Thanks for all of the suggestions and comments. I'm now going to post a slew of enemies that are in the game. Some of these are incomplete, and there will be tons more! Lemme know if you have any suggestions/ideas, heck if you like one let me know!

Prepare yourselves. This image is large.

Edit: Just spotted a duplicate skele in there. Darn things just don't stop reproducing.

I think your values need a little work! It's sometimes different to tell some segments of your sprites apart (eg, the ogre/orc-thing's skin vs it's armour), since they're the same or similar values... It's incredibly straining on the eyes.

http://media.steampowered.com/apps/dota2/workshop/Dota2CharacterArtGuide.pdf (Sometimes this link doesn't work, in which case you'll want to right click>save as)
This is more for concept art and from the ground up character design, but may help with both the value-design issue and the color choices, which are a tad off kilter. TO be specific, you're choosing a lot of unsaturated, grey-feeling colors.
Perhaps that has something to do with the feel of the game, but even with grey-greens it could stand to look a little more interesting.

Just my two cents!

Thanks a lot. I really like dota 2, and I didn't realize they had this guide out there. I just have trouble with saturated colors. I feel like most of the time they're just too bright. Going to def take a look.

They look great, but they also look too muddy and blurry at the same time. Get some solid lines and contrast in there.

Edit: wow, that got jumbled into a huge mess of html. Going to try to clean it up here.

You don't have to super-saturate your colors for there to be good contrast. You can have a full range of value with zero saturation (i.e. just ranging from white, through grays, to black). If you picture a color wheel, with neutral gray at the center, and increased saturation (aka "chroma") at the edge, with hue changing around the circle, your value would be a new vertical dimension that turned your color wheel into a color cylinder, pushing the specific hue/chroma combination lighter or darker.

Though your chroma range shrinks as you approach pure white and pure black, so it's not a true cylinder but more of a football (american) shape.

Your skeletons, for example, read much better than the orcs because they stick to the grey range, but the bones are much lighter than the armor. Nothing breaks up the value set of the orcs, they're one continuous dark grey. You could either throw different colors at it (so you get hue contrast and complements) or push the values of the chosen color range (darker shadows, selective highlights, etc).

Here, I hope you don't mind, I just did a quick paintover to give an example.

I know you're sticking to more of a cel-shaded approach, but the gist is that I pushed the shadow darker (same hue), increased the saturation (a little bit) and the lightness of the eyes to make them stand out more, and pushed the lightness of the top and right side (again, no hue or saturation change). I also made the lines darker because there wasn't enough value contrast between the wood and the "grain"

[attachment=12991:comparison.jpg]

To be fair though, I haven't seen how this looks in the game environment, so that could add a lot, too.