Samurai Sprite Sheet
The sprite sheets for a samurai as well as his opponents for a small class project. Pixel art is a skill in its own right, as your canvas is so small that you need to get creative to ensure the viewer can even still discern what the thing is supposed to be. When my color pallet was limited to greyscale with a dramatic flash of red, I had to consider depth as a means of identifying the different body segments.
In order to more rapidly create the various posed for the samurai and the basic enemies, I made the designs by sorting them into different limbs. Poses that had similar positions could recycle the exact design from each other.
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Samurai armor is comprised of several layered plates, which was visually expressed by the alternating light and dark gray over the body and shoulder armor. The front arm has the lightest of the dark greys while the torso and far arm have progressively darker greys. This same design decision is also how the skeleton boss is given the appearance of leaning in from the dark backdrop.
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My favorite trick in this design was taught to me by one of my good friends who was at the time also working on a pixel art game. The sword is given an implied curve by using an optical illusion of progressively darkening the pixels as it gets closer to the tip, even though the pixels themselves are still arranged in a zig-zag pattern.