Well hello there, Undwight. I was linked to this page to give you a few pointers as you seem to be going seriously wrong with your pixel art. I think it's too early days for you to be attempting to write tutorials yourself, as you just aren't there yet. In your tutorial you instruct people on how to apply proper lighting, but you seem to be ignoring it all over your more demanding sprites. With the first tree you posted, you seem to have completely avoided putting any directional shading on it. It looks like a flat image. Also, for a tileset piece, it's also in a wrong perspective. It looks more like its being seen directly onwards than from a traditional RPG viewpoint. I don't believe you've done yourself any favours by the colour palette you've picked. You need more contrast between your shades and you also have to mix more colours together. You're making a rookie mistake of just steadily lowering the brightness of shades, where you should be taking advantage of the whole colour wheel and saturation as well. Put more dark blue shades in the shadows and more yellow in for highlights. Trees are pretty advanced stuff and I don't think you're ready for them yet. Start out with smaller objects.
With your giant tree tileset piece, I have to say, that is way too advanced for you. Again, you've neglected to take advantage of a full colour palette and basic shading. There is also way too many wildly different colours on there. It starts to look like the woeful world of Oz. You've drawn leaves coming off your presumed vine ladder. Where are those leaf shapes on the normal sized tree you made right up the top of the tutorial page? You must learn to master the basics before attempting wildly advanced pieces like this.
Another problem I have is that you haven't got the dithering right. It seems like you've just randomly used the spray can tool to make a "noise" effect. Dithering does not work like this. The dots are actually a lot more uniformly placed and there is a pattern to it. You should study dithering further.
However, my overwhelming major concern for this tutorial is you encourage people to do lazy and very very evil, bad techniques like flipping and copy/pasting. I don't object to do re-colouring, as long as it's done in the least bodged way possible i.e. doing it colour by colour carefully selecting a new palette. Flipping/mirroring is absolutely evil. The pros can get away with it because they know exactly when to use it and when not to. By flipping trees and melons, you're teaching people to slack. It looks terrible, really. They're the worst places you can mirror because your sprite ends up looking so flat and so fake, nobody can find that it looks correct. Copying a pasting over other objects to make new ones is a terrible thing to teach. Where you've gone wrong here is that you've not gone back over your copy/pasted pieces fixing up the shading to make it look like the stuff underneath the new pasted up hasn't got shadow cast all over it. For rookies, the core audience of your tutorial, you should not encourage them to pick up slack, lazy and awful shortcuts. I suggest you remove these two parts of your tutorial and actually replace them with comments about how these things should be avoided as much as possible.
I apologise for absolutely slamming your tutorial. I know you won't have liked to read that, but I really urge you to brush up on your own skills before trying to teach others. We all have to start somewhere and I think you'll get it eventually if you stick at it. One day it'll just click and you'll suddenly understand how to do it correctly. I'm planning to release a couple of pixel art tutorials soon. Hopefully they'll be able to aid you in your progress.
