[Art: Spriting, Feedback] My First Sprite

[Espeon]

Before I begin my post, let me first undermine it completely: I'm not an artist and don't really consider myself a creative person, plus this is the first time I finished a sprite (not a set of sprites linked to a character, just one sprite), so I suggest lowering your expectations. Also: I know the sprite is like 80% still Koga's sprite from HGSS, but given that I'm not familiar with how shadow works and how to scale things etcetera, that's the best I could do (besides, I really like his pose and outfit, especially the scarf thing).

 

Okay, let's start the actual post: Hi! I'm Espeon. As a casual player and mainly breeder, posting in the creative works section of the forum is kind of out of my comfort zone, but I'm very interested in spriting and would like to become better at it (I'm mostly interested in trainer spriting, as I'm not a fan of fakemon). So I decided to post this first creation adaptation, to get some tips on how to move on from here, so I could ideally integrate the sprites into the game as my own custom character. 

 

Here's the character I'm creating (well, trying to). His name is (probably going to be) Aespo, and he's a trainer specialising in Psychic types:

Spoiler

 

As you can see, I took Koga as a base and my main struggle so far was changing the hair. I also added some sort of forehead necklace with Espeon's stone in it (Espeon is my favourite Pokémon and so it's my character's ace). I tried giving Koga's outfit a pattern and though it worked quite well, both my tries, especially the first one, made the ninja armor look like a bathrobe/pyjamas, which means I'm probably not going to use them. I did give him some sort of psychic shield/surfboard to travel on, inspired by Gwen from Ben 10.

 

So, I'd love some feedback. What can I do to improve these sprites? And, more importantly, how do I make the back sprite, overworld sprite, ... for it?

 

Any tips and suggestions are very much appreciated! Thanks for reading, looking forward to hear from the rest of this community.

 

EDIT: I added a second sprite, the VS sprite and added some minor changes to the front sprite (like the forehead necklage with Espeon's orb, which has been embedded into his forehead.