I'm not using Breeze (or any templates for that matter) but here are two from my RMVX game I'm working on.
http://www.munk3yboy.com/fohgame/millie.gif[/img]
25 colors (including transparancy)
http://www.munk3yboy.com/fohgame/mytoss.gif[/img]
28 colors (including transparancy)
It isn't 1986 anymore, you should use enough colors to describe your sprite but not too many it becomes a burden to animate. There isn't an artificial number thats any better or worse than some other number. If you sprited a leprechaun on a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow it
should have more than a character in a full set of blackened iron armor. If your eye can't hardly pick up the difference between two colors one should be removed or the contrast should be bumped up. Otherwise it really is just a useless color and more along the lines of an artifact that an improvement. Reducing for the sake of reducing is pretty silly though. If they don't contribute they should be made to contribute or removed thats all. ^^
About the tutorial.
It has tons of innaccuracies. And if you want my opinion your "high-quality" result is actually overall worse than the template, and many of the examples you linked to that you're bashing in the first place. Here is why:
How does it Read?
The thing with the feet. I get what you were trying to do but the reason it looks off balance is because the silhouette reads more like a soldier standing at attention than it does a person casually standing. The original reads more like his legs are spread apart in a more natural stance regardless of the stumpyness. Readability is infinately more important in sprites and icons than anatomical accuracy (and art in general actually - it IS all just an illusion after all). Specially on chibi/SD.
To check your readability just blacken the entire thing on a white background. The better you can immediately tell what you're trying to communicate without any details the better it
reads. The chin modification I agree with and do think you improved that, it does read a tad jagged even at full scale. The crotch concerns eh... I think you may have just been wanting to make a penis joke, thats pretty obvious a bellybutton. Regardless, unless people plan to have naked characters, its a tad irrelavent and entirely based on opinion since it does read just fine.
Lighting or Avoiding Flat sprites
You linked to Niklas Jansen's tutorial but I don't think you grasped most of the concepts yourself. Most of his tutorial is on lighting and this is by far your biggest area you did incorrectly.
Lighting and shadows (Luminosity) determines the difference between flat or round not the color that it reflects back. The original template I can automatically tell where the light source is, above and a little bit in front of the character. This is a pretty ideal location for a game sprite because it describes the objects shapes adequately and it works in many different lighting conditions without looking out of place. Most tilesets indicate light from the same area just a tad to the left to give cast shadows off buildings and things, so lighting a character that way too would probably work out ok.
In your first pass you moved it to directly above his head and then told everyone to just ignore it, because you noticed something was up but didn't exactly know what it was. What you did is actually similar to pillow shading, but rather than a light being shined directly from the front, you're going directly from above. If you do photography at all, you probably know shooting under a high noon sun is discouraged since the shadows it causes will black out peoples eyes and possibly their faces depending on hair or if they're wearing a hat for example. It makes their faces not read as well, thus not as flattering a photo. The original template was much better in this aspect. You mentioned that you do not know why the body was not shaded in the same way as the head. I have no idea who made those or their art knowledge but I'd be surprised if they did that on pure accident. The reason is basically called planes. If you paint a portrait, and put a specular light on the end of a nose, any speculars on the forehead shouldn't be as apparant as the one on that nose, dull it up or (i usually don't include them myself). This help indicate it's further inside the drawing than the nose is. So in the case of the sprite the head is closer to the viewer than say the tummy is. Its part of utilizing depth. Thats what the lack of shading on the body is doing. If you look at the Jansen's pin-ups (tutorial guy) he does it very frenquently on legs that are further "in" the drawings they're usually just completely undetailed gray blobs. But it works :thumb:Â
To check your lighting you should be able to completely desaturate your entire sprite to just shades of gray and still be able to tell where the light is shining from. On your later pass you almost completely removed all indications of light right after telling people not to make their sprites flat! No no no. Light/Shadow = round, not colors! You just made the flattest sprite on the entire page! Now to be fair you DID add it back in when you detailed it with clothing and hair, but mainly just a couple cast shadows. The original with the darker spot near the eyes. I could build that shape out of clay. Just that tiny indication tells you that the eyes are abit more inset than the jaw area. With yours the face not only looks completely flat the entire head doesn't even look round. Looks like a cardboard cutout.
Here is a concept art from my game. Chosen because it is mostly in grays but you can easily see it isn't flat even with grays and the light source is in a similar spot to the original template (little more to the left though). Compare it to the the original sprites head, and your edits. Hopefully you can see that your final pass before details is by far the most flat. Even cell shading follows light rules, it's just simplified.
http://www.munk3yboy.com/fohgame/rrod.jpg[/img]
How to pick color palletes
I checked your colors, you actually do well here, better than the template. You could probably punch up your contrast in spots, but hell I should too so it'd be hypocritical for me to harp on about that. Unfortunately its the part you glossed over, and didn't really explain.
Heres a color slider, this is from Photoshop but if you're using something decent they all have something like this. Make sure you have it set to HSB mode and not RGB or it'll look a bit different. You don't have to actually pick colors this way, its just easier for me to illustrate What you should be thinking while you choose them.
http://www.munk3yboy.com/fohgame/pallete.jpg[/img]
H = Hue - controls the color
S = Saturation - this is how bright or dull a color is. Realistic is usually pretty dull (desaturated), cartoony is bright and colorful (saturated).
B = Brightness - Controls the luminosity of a color. AKA lighting.
Red Orange Yellow = Warm
Blue Purple Green = Cool
There isn't a hard edge between them. Greens can be pretty warm, Reds can be pretty cool etc. But thats Basically what you're after. Incidently gray can be either depending on what is around it. (See that Tutorial linked he has some great illustrations about that). Usually warm = closer, cool = farther away. Theres probably some psychological reason for it but I don't know. If you want a pleasing look go with that, if you want the viewer to be uncomfortable switch it up. Scary movies many times use cool colors. (Aliens did, and it kind of became a standard for futurisitic sterile looking too).
Pick your base color. That peach I screencapped will do nicely. In my sprites above I'm doing 4 colors per area. I have a base color, a warmer highlight, a cooler shadow, then a darker outline (also colored, it isn't black). Its enough for me but you can up it and go to 6's adding some inbetweens on your highlights and shadows. I wouldn't probably go much past that because it starts to get unweildy to keep colors correct while animating. You can go lower but my stuff always comes out looking like some atari crap if I do. I'd suggest ditching the highlight first over shadow in most cases if you do though. You can get rid of the outline, I know that Xenogear's sprites had no outlines but I think they look pretty bad (although they animate ungodly well).
http://www.munk3yboy.com/fohgame/elly_run.gif[/img]
Anyway choosing colors! So from our peach we slide the H bar a bit more towards a yellow perhaps (yellow usually feels warmer than a red does if you're going from an orange) Bump up the brightness bar alittle as well, probably desaturate the color a bit more (move it more to the white). This will be our highlight. To get the cooler shadows color pick our original base, then move more towards the cool colors and set the brightness lower. The H bar is set up kind of weird as far as warms and cools go but basically for the cool color I'd head left since the distance including wrap around should get you a bit closer to the really cool colors faster(blue/purple). Its all about experimentation though and you can just flat out go to an actual purple or blue if you wish. It gives a much different vibe. With a blue base I go pretty far into purple for example.
Heres an unfinished sketch to illustrate it more clearly perhaps. See the blue/grey fur? Look closely at some of my shadows they're almost completely purple. They jive well with the blue next to them so at full size your eye blends them together fairly nicely.
http://www.munk3yboy.com/fohgame/wolfen.jpg[/img]
For the outlines I usually find that taking your darkest and just going a bit darker (you can go alittle cooler too if you want) suffices. You should get something like this:
http://www.munk3yboy.com/fohgame/colors.jpg[/img]
If you desaturate that you'll see the luminosity switching so light control is good... as you go right to left the colors get cooler each step. The second color is my base so I'd mostly use this through most of it, the highlight (far left color) would be used for the head, then you use the last for an outline and the other you can use to antialias or cell shade with. If a color is too bright (I think my highlight probably is for skin) or too dark adjust as needed. If you got a blue shirt set up some colors the same way starting with blue. And so on.
EDIT : I wrote that the colors right to left get cooler, its actually the opposite, the left are warm - right are cool. I'll go get analyzed for dyslexia. =P
Small Recap:
Brightness is your shading,
Hue is your warm and colds.
Saturation I tend to experiment a lot. In the real world shadows tend to be more desaturated and blue during the day (from the sky). I find that actually bumping up the saturation alittle on my shadows gives a neat effect. Bit more punch perhaps. The key with color though is just practice and trying things. You can get wildly different feels from different things, theres no one way to do it all. If your sprite is already reading well, and your lighting is correct its a lot more difficult to ruin a sprite with the colors.
Readability = most important!!!! You can't color a sprite like a crab without it looking like a crab first!
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Hope that helps. I didn't think your tutorial was horrible. I think if you'd had your lighting correct and explained how to choose colors and dropped the arrogant attitude and trying to put others down it'd be fairly top notch. The leg thing is sort of optional. If you want a soldier stance I'd definately use yours, but I really do think the original template reads a lot better for a more normal everyday stance. I'm guessing thats what most people need for their characters.
PS too lazy to proofread, so hopefully the grammar is manageable.