Feedback Request: Roast my First Portrait Like a Belhalla BBQ

Creative
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This isn’t just my first non-introduction post on FEU; it’s also my very first sprite portrait splice. For my first spriting, I’m trying to make a portrait for Rearmed Tana from Heroes, and it’s a lot harder than it looks, at least for a novice. I first used Tana’s official portrait and then took some liberty by splicing it with Eleanora’s chest to match her shirt and attaching Priscilla’s ornament to the pauldron.
I tried looking at official art, fanart, and portraits of other characters as a reference to help me, but there are 2 things that really irk me:

  1. The ribbon. The ponytail portion was no issue, as I just looked at Nino’s headband and used that as a reference to make a thinner ribbon. The side, however, is a whole different beast. I decided to snapshot Rearmed Tana’s Heroes art and then downsize the ribbon as a base to color over, but due to the obvious 15-color limitation, I could only really use two shades of pink. The shading somewhat looks fine for now, but the 15 colors are more painfully limiting when it comes to…
  2. The cape. Oh goodness. Plenty of FE GBA portraits have a collar. Plenty of FE GBA portraits have a cape. But not a single one (that I found, at least) has both seamlessly combined together. I looked at Murdock, Karel, the Reed brothers, and Carlyle as reference, but it just doesn’t have the flowy feeling of a cape or a tidy structure that tucks well. Again, I looked at fanart to try to fill in the blanks. I really wish I could use lighter colors to make it look better (or at least not look either pale flesh-colored white or carrot-cake dark brown), but again, 15-color limit.
    Does anyone have any tips that I could use to improve it (especially the shading)? I really want this Tana to look vibrant like the Heroes art while still faithful to the GBA style. Don’t hold back with the heat; Falcon Knights have good Res, after all!
    ArcaneTana

P.S. Not sure whether a post like this would belong in Creative or Requests. Requests seems to be more like straight-up commissions rather than feedback.
Portrait neither F2E nor F2U. Only edit with the purpose of demonstrating criticism, please!

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You could also get help by asking in the discord spritans channel,

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Don’t get to hung up on trying to maintain the existing colours or colours only available on existing mugs. If you want to maximize the most out of your colours you are going to have to change some things and play around.

For example in my Henry portrait from Awakening, he actually doesnt have a white tone at all, but using the other tones I am able to trick your eyes into assuming it is.
image

As for the collar shaping, yours wasn’t too bad although I think if you smooth out the angles they come over her chest and collar bone, it would look nicer. In her art the collar sits underneath her shoulder pauldrons so they can cover up her collar up.
image

The other thing about your choice of colours, usually unless they’re darker colours its harder to get away with just using 2 tones. You still kind of want to use another darker tone to help border their pieces. Don’t be afraid to also increase the size of somethings a little bit to accommodate these extra shading tones.
imageimage

Here is a sample small touch up and recolour with an updated colour palette. I changed the lightest skin tone slightly, and changed the white tones from a blue to a grey one (this matches her FEH art colour better). Because the grey transitions nicer into the skin tone, it could be matched to make a reasonable white, giving you one extra colour to play with, which I used here to give you an extra yellow tone for her collar. As for the ribbon, I change the tone slightly so at its darkest it could use the darkest skin tone for help with bordering and defining folds in her ribbon.
Another thing I noticed where your additions to her outfit are is that it needs some more shading consideration where the skin meets clothing
image

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Hey there! I actually posted an edit in the FEU Discord earlier. But your edit does look pretty sharp, too!
ArcaneTana

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Update: After taking advice from Garytop and FEU Discord, I compiled this. Shading is still a bit fuzzy for me, but here is the edited portrait.
Tana {Rearmed}

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