Spriting!

I've been making a lot of sprites recently for the group project I'm working on, and as such have been, I think, improving at it!

My old style (made about 6-8 months ago, posted a week ago)

Very simple, VERY small with no shading or any sort of real depth other than a slight leg over-lap on the diagonal-walking ones. General features are distinguishable (hair colour, jacket over a white shirt, bag) but there's not really much to go on.

So! Yesterday I entered a competition on DeviantArt, for which my contest entry was:

There's a lot of good artists usually entering these competitions, so I decided to play up the cute-factor due to time constraints limiting the technically-good factor. I think I pulled it off quite nicely, the large eyes, "cute" proportioning (large head, small body) makes it look "chibi", and the general composition of the piece is rather reminiscent of a squirrel, possibly one of the cutest animals I've ever had eating my shoelaces.

But, ofcourse, just drawing this wasn't enough, so today, after a long day of handing out CVs (and getting a few application forms to fill out!), I decided to sprite it up before continuing work on the group project!

So I present to you, a technically much better sprite than my earlier ones!

Sure, it's larger that the previous sprites allowing for more details, but I just love it! Had more of an opportunity to play with the shading, could put on more details (claws!), and try to get it closer to the original, which I think I pulled off here! I've lost some of the boyish charm and it has more of a 1st-gen Pikachu feel, but hey, it's cute.