Artistic direction feedback needed for sprites

[BrashDarrington 1]

So I need some feedback on my sprite design. For some background, the game is sci-fi and artistically in the style of "Phantasy Star IV" 

 

When porting the sprites over to VX, I noticed that while they were tall sprites, they were fit at 32x16 px. After blowing the ripped sprites up, I was left with doing a full redraw to get the same feel as the source material. 

 

I've never done a full draw before (only edits) so this is new to me. Any feedback would be appreciated. As you can see too, I have not shaded the sprite yet, so this is far from the finished product.  

[Necromedes 103]

It actually doesn't look bad. It really needs shading as you mentioned but I think you're doing pretty well for a first attempt.

[BrashDarrington 1]

Thanks Necromedes! Good to know I'm on the right track. And like I said before, I've done ALOT of edits in my day so its not super new to me. I will say though, the hands... my god the hands! What a time sink that was to get those right.

 

As far as shading goes, to make sure I'm still in line with the graphic inspiration, I was thinking of going with a 5 tone color system. What you see there is the "base" color. The remaining 4 will be 2 tones lighter and 2 tones darker. Using limits like this should make it end up looking pretty close to the source material, even though it's like a bump from 16 to 32 bit color.

 

I did a full color blend sprite using a base from the internet (cant remember the name) but it came out looking too different then the vision I had for this project, so its scraped. I've included in the post for reference.

 

Since I do all my media in Fireworks, it should be easy to shade using the burn and dodge tools... but if you know and tricks of trade you'd be willing to share, I'd be very grateful.