The character reminds me a lot a paladin from Diablo II
Looks really good

Does look awesome but the amount of work involved in creating your sprite sheets sounds scary. It would kill the project for me.

I know you are more a 2D artist but have you considered maybe making 3D models for the main characters then baking the animations into sprite sheets using some kind of automated process?

Karei: Thank you, I'm a big fan of Diablo II also

Aardvajk: The character is a rendered Blender model, sorry if there was any confusion. I do enjoy 2D graphics but the amount of frames needed for the characters were just too much The backgrounds are hand drawn though. I hope I am going to be able to pull off a reasonably coherent visual style.

Never the less I find the character creation process rather repetative. I'm using imagemagick, a cmd prompt utility program to stitch the individual frames together. I still have to manually edit the final sprite sheet to conform it to my needs; I add an edge border around each sprite to prevent black pixels from bleeding into the sprite (bilinear artifact). I also edit the alpha channel in some special cases. This has to do with sorting when I render the sprite with alpha transparency (the character is 50% alpha blended when behind an obstacle).