Tree: Dithering is nice once in a while for things, but don't go overboard with it. The trunk of the tree shouldn't be that dithered. It makes it look too round and lacking normal tree-ish texture. Also, when you save your pictures, save in .png if you are using paint. If you are using photoshop, you could use save for web and use a high quality .jpg or a .gif. There is a similar save for web feature in gimp, although you will have to ask someone a little more familiar with gimp for that. Your colors are very well chosen. But, you tend to pillow shade. Try doing a different light source. Make it come from one side or another. Try looking out your window and looking at trees and what the shades look like. Or even look at a picture of a tree on google. Don't be afraid to use references. Figure: Yay, sketch! Your sketch looks very nice. The arms are a little thin, but the pose is nice and the anatomy is OK. Once you cleaned out the lines, I think you lost some of the definition of the neck. It looks very blocky there and because his helm is so big and blocky, it doesn't flatter the noodly arms. The hands look a little too big and like he is wearing boxing gloves once you cleaned up the lines. Take a look at some hands. Hands are hard though, they will come in time. Overall, just keep pixeling. You could end up doing very well. For a first pixel is actually very well done. You tackled human anatomy quite nicely.