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[LiquidAsh]

I'm working on some art for a programming puzzle game that is set in a cartoony fairy tale world of magic, genies, ogres, and creatures called lambdapods.  As you can probably tell from these samples, I'm not a very experienced artist... and would love to hear feedback/suggestions on how to make these designs stronger.

The environment (/level map):

The protagonists (the lambdapods):

Some more characters (ogre and genie):


As you may be able to see, I tried reusing the shape of the lambdapod body repeatedly in hopes that this might help tie the graphics together in a consistent style.  I'm not sure whether that was entirely effective.  But I'm very interested in any and all comments or suggestions about how this is looking.  Thanks in advance!

[ThemsAllTook]

This seems like a pretty good start. A lot of these pieces look overly flat to my eyes, and it took me a little while to figure out why... I think you could get a lot of mileage out of varying the thickness and color of your outlines. Especially in the map scene, thicker lines toward the foreground and thinner toward the background might help imply some depth. The grass, water, sky, and to a lesser extent the mountains are pretty large areas of just one color... I'd try some subtle gradients in those areas to see if it works, or maybe just a few more details, like blades of grass, ripples in the water, etc.

For the characters, I'd suggest seeing what it would look like if you used a darker variation of the surrounding color instead of pure black in all of the outlines. Thickness variation here might be less about depth and more about emphasis. Play with it a bit, and I'll bet you can find a way to make it feel better.

[LiquidAsh]

Awesome.  Thanks for this advice! The very small gradients make a huge difference IMHO.  And I think that the colored (and different width) outlines really helped the background, but made the characters stand out less.  I also added some transparency to the clouds and genie.  Still putzing with the idea of grass and ripples.  Think that having them animate an interesting way will be key.  Thanks again.