Playing with more colors and bigger sprites, and taking baby-steps towards SNES-style stuff. NES is a lot easier with its harsher limitations.
Don't 100% know what I'm doing with shading but I'm going to attempt it and I guess I'll just have to be unafraid to make mistakes and improve.
Probably should try to draw more than just myself too. Back when I was practicing NES graphics I doodled a bunch of friends and it was fun trying to reduce other friends' characters down to something that works in 3 colors.
Fixed the direction of the shading to make a bit more sense based on feedback.
@NovaSquirrel I'd increase the contrast so its less linear, and make the line art a bit darker and you'd be pretty much right in the early SNES style.
@wolfcoder You mean make the difference between the different shades of a given hue less linear? I'm used to picking colors from the NES palette, so actually having freedom in picking arbitrary colors and still making it work is something I'll have to figure out and learn.
@NovaSquirrel yeah don't worry. Color choice is almost entirely its own field in art, you'll figure out your favorite color ramps soon.