Hey mate, nice to see you're making more sprites. I'm trying to help everyone today so i'll make you no exception by taking an in-depth review of your new axe.
So, to be honest, it's currently in a pretty bad shape, both color and shape-wise. But i'll help you try to gain some insight on how to make it better. I hope you'll learn something from this:
Let's first take a look at the gem on the bottom part (I'm assuming it's a gem):
It has a generic gem shape, which is totally okay, but the shading is almost non-existent. When shading, you need 3-6 varieties of the color, ranging from very light ones to very dark ones. Here you have 2 different tones at best, others can hardly be distinguished.
So let's take your color pallete here and refine it with better range of tones:
Now let's remember that gems and shiny objects have a rather particular way of shading to them. At least i found out it works the best that way. So how do you shade a gem?
1. You fill the whole shape with dark color
2. Make a little circle-like object out of highlight color on the top left part of the gem.
3. Make the similar kind of shape out of the regular color on the bottom right part of the gem.
4. Color around those 2 shapes with the 3rd darkest tone
Very very simple, isn't it? And you get something like this:
So if we apply these rules to your gem, we'll get this:
Now let's take a look at the handle. It's basically a diagonal stick filled with absolutely yellow color. Once again, I encounter a beginner using yellow. If you saw any of my other "tutorials", you could have noticed that I hate this color. Here's what I just said to Thorn:
First of all, and remember this, avoid using yellow color for anything else than details. That color is a natural highlight and it's hard to achieve good-looking results with it if you aren't very experienced. If you try to shade the yellow color properly, you may get something like gold or copper, but it won't stay yellow - and it shouldn't, that color is just horrible generally.
In your case, let's make this handle kinda wooden? That would be nice.
We need the pallete of colors for wood, so I'll use this one that I have from long ago and turn your yellow handle into wood:
So we're going to:
1. Fill the handle with the 2nd darkest color, and color the farthest line to the right with the darkest color.
2. Make little triangles with the lighter color every 2 px.
3. Fill the center line with the lightest color on the pixels between the 'triangles'
And we get something like this:
And finally, we come to the blade, which I find is the thing most beginners struggle with.
In this case, this 'axe' has a rather peculiar shape, but we'll try to make something of it.
Let's fill the blade with the 2nd to darkest shade:
What you need to remember is - the blade will most likely always look good if the edge (where it's sharp) is very bright, and the body of the blade is semi-light or even dark. We'll go with that second variant here. Let's mark the places where it's sharp with the lightest color:
Now we need to darken the lower parts of it and introduce a few layers of lighter colors (prominently on the left side of the axe - where the light comes from):
Now just take the semi-dark tone (middle grey) and use it in a combination with different shades to fill this "black" empty space in the middle with some kind of random details, so that it doesn't look so plain. After that, on the very edges, emphasise the blades by highlighting them with the lightest color (white):
And this is what we get:
Now, keep in mind that you should probably make some more details for it, as the handle looks very simple and straight. You can experiment afterwards, but I believe these are the fundamental basics that you should know to help you make more awesome sprites!
Keep working and posting :]