Hey there pal, I heard you wanted some feedback so I thought I'd drop by. I'm not the best at feedback so hold on tight haha
First of all, changing the size of a sprite can be done is any program. I'm going to assume you're using Paint here- use the select tool to select the general area around your sprite, and then shrink or enlarge it by dragging the edges of the box. Beware though- resizing may cause a sprite to lose its quality, so watch out.
Second of all, you seem to know your way around the line tool in Paint, that's good since it's what you're mostly going to use. Try to keep the edges smooth though, the shoulders for example could be curvier to give a better outline to Jake. Outline-wise you may want to look into the techniques of anti-aliasing and general curve techniques. This is a matter of pracise, and if you spend some time trying it, I'm sure you'll get the hang of it.
In your sprite, you've already applied basic shading, this is good. To shade even better, you should look into the technique of a
lightsource. A lightsource is basically a source of light (yeah) that falls onto the sprite, so to say. The position of the light affects each part of your sprite differently, but as a whole it affects the sprite consistantly. Right now you've mainly applied your shading to each outline, which leads to inconsistant lightning, so you could improve on this.
Anatomy-wise, all I want to advise to you is to make sure the legs are both the same size, it'll make your character a lot more tricky. Hands can also be tricky to sprite, but the only piece of advice I can give you in this departement is to just practise and look for good reference. Sometimes you can even use your own hands as reference.
You seem to know about cloth-folding techniques as well. This is good because it can really make the difference between a sprite having depth or not. I highly recommand using more reference (you could google 'cloth folds' or 'how to draw clothes folding for example) to perfect your technique as a next step. Also remember that most folds originate there where the clothing is the most tight. I think in this case that could be the gold button next to Jake's right shoulder. So the folds should come from there as well.
Also, as a general rule, make sure you save your files as either PNG or BMP, never as a JPG/JPEG. The latter ruin the quality of the image. PNG and BMP have much sharper colours when uploaded.
I know that this is quite a bit, and I apologize if it comes across as demotivatin, but I hope you keep at it. Spriting is a lot of fun and I hope you can have a lot of fun with it as well! It's just that spriting (and all forms of art, really) are a matter of falling 7 times and getting up 8 times, always remember that. Practise makes perfect.
If, in any case, I used a term or word in this post that you're not familair with, you can try checking out the spriters dictionairy, maybe it's explained in there (the dictionairy in general will be good to read to get a basic understanding of the core techniques of spriting;
http://www.vg-resource.com/thread-25474.htmlyou can find more tutorials/tips/techniques for spriting on our McLeodgaming Tutorial Platform-
http://forums.mcleodgaming.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=39454Lastly, congrats on your first sprite Kidicarus29!, and welcome to the Spriter's Corner!