One place to start improving on is your metal rendering. Try doing a Google image search for "metal cylinder". Notice that cylinder colors are rarely a smooth left-right gradient of shades of gray.

Metal cylinders usually have bright and dark stripes mixed in, which are reflections of lights and objects around that cylinder. The stripes facing the main light source tend to be brighter and yellower. The stripes facing shadows are darker and more blue/purple.

With pixel art you don't have to get nearly that detailed. Just a few colors and stripes will make it appear metallic. Take a peek at the tin can from my Recycle Items Set:

Notice even those the can is a gray metal, it has some green and blue and purple. The stripes are not arranged in a smooth gradient, instead it's mixed up some.

I also notice you used some dithering to shade the metal. That can work with the right style. But usually, dithering adds some implied roughness/texture. It will make your metal feel less smooth and shiny compared to having hard edge stripes.

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Another thing you may notice about that tin can is there are horizontal ridges. The detail is not drawn on the metal with a black line. Instead it's implied with the colors. If you understand the way your main light is pointing, you can easily add in convincing ridges, bevels, seams, rivets, shadows, etc. by moving up or down one color on your palette.

On your robot you have black lines to show a panel and a vent. That's fine for a simple art style, but it won't help your material look metal. Try using your color ramp instead to imply where the lights and shadows are catching these raised/lowered features. Example:

This is singularly one of the most helpful, clear, and concise pixel art tutorials on the entire internet. I'd easily put it in the top five not just because it is so beginner friendly, but *manages* to be so beginner friendly *while* packing so much style, technique, and guidance into such a small response.

Thank you Mr. Bellinger for taking the time to teach others.

I think the thing to notice is that in clint.bellinger's examples is that the gradient does not

move strictly from light to dark.  This is true in the photos also.  Not there is a small highlight, a large dark section, a stronger highlight and then another dark spot and then mid level at the edge.   

My suggestion would be to make his eyes and mouth a bit bigger to fil in all that empty space.   Might not be the look you are going for but worth a try.

oh also, the highlights run along the length of the cylinder as opposed to forming a tight ball.

Here's a really rough draft trying to apply similar shading as clint's tin can to Robo's head.  The top is pretty much unfinished, and I don't know that I got the size of the highlights/etc. right.  So basicaly it doesn't look very good, but hopefully it at least demonstrates the idea.

Something else to consider, the light currently comes from the upper left, but the character is facing the right.  This means most of his face is in shadow.  Might make more sense to flip the light to the upper right so the front of Robo's face is the lit up part.

:)

I don't know about way, way, WAY better, but I'm glad you found it at least useful!

So, flat areas of metal technicall would work sort of like mirrors. But there's nothing around the robot to "reflect" here. So I'd say to continue using the bands of light and shadow, even if it wouldn't exactly work like that on a flat surface.

I tried a few things here:

- Use stripes to shadw out the body

- tweak the top of the head. Have each band of color curve around and meet on the other side

- Added a slight implied lip to the bottom of the head

- Thickened drop shadows in a couple places to help imply depth

Feel free to ignore these if it's not the style you're thinking. But it's kind of how I would go about it.

Shading on his body looks amazing!!   Clint u r incredible!!!

Two thoughts on the head:

the highlight cutting right through the center of his face is a bit distracting.

Since it's a portrait his face should be the priority and the main thing that grabs your eye.

Right now, for me, the shading is what pops out and his face seems a bit either stuck on top of the grey bands or hiding underneath them.   You might do well to dial back the number of bands/shades, and try to arrange them so there is a nice solid light grey piece right to the right of center for his face to sit on.  If you donit right, you sbould still be able to imply the cone shape but with fewer bands.  

This is also important because with the number of shades/bands you use on his face, you're setting the bar and level of detail you'll want to use elsewhere in order to keep the image consistent.   There's some leeway there, but generally you want to use a similar number of steps from light to dark throughout the whole image.  As an extreme example, imagine his head has 100 shades of grey from light to dark, but then his body only uses 3 shades from light to dark.  They won't look like part of the same image at all.

Second, there's kind of a perspective cheat going on right now with his mouth and face in general being perfectly horizontal but the shoulders now tilted and base of head showing some perspective and rounding.   You might try putting a little curve in his mouth and offsetting the eyes from one another in order to angle his face a bit to match the new angle of his head.   This mismatch in perspectives may be part of the reason I am seeing the face as pasted over the shading.

This is definitely one of the most helpful, uncomplicated and amazing tutorials on the internet. To think that this:

Became this  in one  short tutorial! Thanks Devsman for starting this tutorial and thanks Clint Belanger and Capbros for this amazingly detailed tutorial on how to make metal look like metal  

Some more thoughts:

His eyes are actually ok to be the same size, but they should be offset in y slightly, to account for the now isometric type angle.   

The angled mouth is definitely an improvement on the stratight horizontal one, but it should have more of a curve to it, to match the curvature of his head.

I think I know what you are saying about the face being a single plane cut into the cylinder.  But the cylinder still has a curve to it, so the mouth hole and eyes need to reflect that.  

There's still something off between Clint's stellar shading on his body and what we've come up with for his head.   The body highlights just have a more natural, organic look to them.  They are a bit random, notice taht not all the bands are straight lines.   The head by contrast is a bit mathematical still.  It's just a really clean gradient.  

Did a quick and dirty mock of offsetting the eyes and curving the mouth.

I also had a go at reducing the gradient a bit to illustrate my point about it drawing attention away from his face.   I just used the fill tool to to this so it's pretty rough, but I think it shows what I was talking about.  Notice how w/ fewer highlights, and especially none running through his face, it puts the emphasis back on his facial features?  

Again, it's pretty rought, also I thought it still needed some highlight, so I tried roughing one in just on the top of his head, but I think that pushed him back to being a bit plasticy.

I see what you mean with the vanishing point, I guess that explains the size difference. 

But the y offset is not because of the vanishing point, it's to match the curve of his head.  The two shouldn't be aligned perfectly horizontal in the image for because his head is curved, so just like his mouth and his chin, the eyes should align along a curve.  Does that make any sense?

new mouth looks great!  that bit of extra 'lip' really sells it!

I started reading this thread from bottom to top, and man the robot looks great! Plus the replies here are being very helpful :D

I just want to point out a detail at the back of the robot's head (sorry if I'm nitpicking). The top and bottom lines of the panel should follow the cylinder's circumference, because the panel is part of the cylinder. I've made a quick example. The left one shows straight lines, regardless of the curve. The right one shows line following (or attemping to) the curve.

maruki's right about that panel, it sticks out now that the perspective is corrected in other places.

Also, I think the bottom of the cylinder may need cleanup. The curve should follow the bottom half of an ellipse. Here I used the Ellipse Select tool and selected an area that fit the left, right, and bottom of the cylinder. I colored in Blue where I think there are missing head cylindier pixels.

Now the three vents need to adjusted to match the curve a bit.

maybe pull the rightmost one down a pixel?

Looks good!   My only comment would be that there is an inconsistency between the head and arms which use kind of a heavy 4-5 shade gradient, and the chest which uses a much simpler 2 shade gradient.  

I would say on the body frames the edge shading is causing issues. You have a single pixel stripe on top/left that is brighter, and on the right/bottom it's darker. Because every panel has this one pixel border, it makes each panel look flat and facing the viewer. Kind of like old style GUI buttons, it just has the appearance of sticking out slightly instead of giving the robot form.

Here, some suggestions.

This one pays more attention to the main light direction, and makes sure each panel's brightness and edge visibility is relative to that.

I lightened the internal sepration lines on the panels. Those fine lines wouldn't be so dark from this far away. Dark lines should be saved for clear separations of depth. Notice I kept the dark line separating the head and the body, and between the shoulders and arms. Those are important to reading the main shapes, in the same way that the black cartoon outline separates shapes from the background.

The trouble is with the perspective.  If I use a perspective transformation to view the robot head-on, you can kind of see what I'm talking about.  His right side (the side on the viewer's left) is larger than his left side in that perspective. 

I used the warp tool to stretch his proportions so they were roughly symmetrical, and then transformed him back into perspective:

Obviously, after image manipulation, this is no longer pixel art, but it demonstrates what I think the issue is in terms of proprtions.

In general, it's pretty hard to do this by eye alone when drawing in perspective, but you don't have to.  If you draw a rectangle in perspective, you can find the center by drawing an X from corner to corner.  The center is where the lines cross.  You can further subdivide that so you have a grid to work with that you can use as a guide.

Hope that makes sense. :)

There's too little camera zoom, or like a pinhead lense, a fisheye effect. try to be a bit more isometric.

As for metal, think of a bended mirror, and any reflection is in the right angle to the surface. For that reason, on the top of the head, those lines aren't fully correct, they should end at the very top.

In 3D, we simply put a cubemap onto something, that will reflect surroundings,and funny enough, often you have to add the reflection of a nonexisting sky and horizon to make it look in any way believable. By using very small cubemaps one can also achieve blur reflections, that looks more like a slightly rough surface.

Well, 3D is not 2D, still hope it may help.

how to connect with you  Devsmanv

maybe someone knows how to find the person I need Devsman