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How terrible are these please i need to know.

In comparison to the polished art that you'll be making two years from now, after practising a lot, they are terrible.

Something you should pay attention to: you didn't add a question mark to the thread title ("How terrible is my art?"), and you didn't capitalise the "i" in "please i need to know".
I think this attention to detail will be important for getting better at something that requires you to evaluate your own work.

The legs on the blue guy look rather short. I don't know how it would all look when animated. Take a look at some sample walking animations and use those to get a sense of what improvements you could make.

As for over all style, set against the white background of a forum thread, they might not look particularly amazing however when set against other art assets in a completely rendered scene, it may look quite different.

Your sword-slashes on the left-hand black-clothed character is nice and organic feeling, however, you are missing some frames that should go inbetween them to make it flow smoother.

Specifically, all the art you showed only has angled lines in 45 degree increments. You go from 0 to 45 to 90 and so on. Even your characters' legs during walking animations only use 45-degree lines. You'll need to practice making angled lines that aren't 45 degrees, which means you'll also need to practice your anti-aliasing (without blurring!), which is probably why you were avoiding angled lines.

After learning good line placement and anti-aliasing those lines on flatly-colored characters, you'll then (afterward) want to learn lighting/shading.

Basically, you seem to have good intuitive sense of motion, but still need to learn and practice some of the basics before moving onto the next level of skills (perspective, then composition, color theory, and etc...).

(Note: I'm not an artist myself. I'm a programmer who does only very limited art)

I feel that the sword slash effects should be smoother, rounder. Maybe use some ruler tool to draw it, or start with a round selection tool to make sure you don't get wobbly lines.

As others have said, legs look rather short, and hips look off:

1) seen from the front, legs look attached offset to the left and right of the body. Look at images of real people, legs should be attached in a straight line with the body.

2) seen from the side, I miss some rounding in the hip area on both guys. The buttocks should bulge out a little bit, and in the front there is the hip bone that should define the form more. Now, seeing how you simplified the body forms a lot, these do not need to be very well formed, or totally correct. Its just the body part in side view that looks off even in such a simplified sprite if left away.

Then there are the animationphases... somebody already mentioned the frames being off. I'd say you should at some point look into not only moving arms and legs of your characters, but also the body. With the frames I see up there your characters will always look stiff, no matter how well the movement of arms and legs match the action. Adding some leaning forward during sprinting, leaning back when coming to a stop, a full body movement during jumps (the whole body should contract when building up to the jump, and the guy should look down during the landing phase), and torso rotations when doing sword swings will move your animations to the next level.

Oh, and never ever forget "the other arm"... I know its tempting and most probably the reason why you choose such a perfect side view, but try to show the other arm at all times, even if its hard to see. Else your character looks like a one-armed person.

Other than that, looks good to me... its not master class yet, but for some art beginner it is actually quite good. You at least have finished sprite sheets that you can drop in your game prototype and start getting stuff moving on screen. That is awesome!

Thanks i just finished redrawning the blue guy i personally think it looks better.I can't post images on replies to threads though also i have fully animated all of these and running animations look a bit off as you said yet at least in motion the sword swings look very smooth.

Do not say that your art is terrible.

Do not ask how bad it is.

When you do, you are already forming opinions in others that are not to your best interests, they will then confirm what you told them.

When you remain neutral, asking for constructive critique, you may be surprised at what people do enjoy and appreciate in your art, such a morale boost will keep you motivated to get even better, and as you improve you will get even more praise, from just a little switch in attitude.

You will still struggle with artist blocks and feelings of incompetence, but such is the nature of any creative pursuit.

I can't post images on replies to threads though

Sure you can - as far as I'm aware, nothing prevents that.

it's not very good, but everyone can improve through practice.

It's clear that you didn't use any references. References are extremely important to improving. Even highly skilled professional artist use them. Find something similar to the style that you want to use and try to copy it - using your own hand, not just paint-bucket to change it's color. Once you can copy basic walk cycles, attacking, etc, make changes to the 'copy'. After that, try your own origional character or animations.

There are 100s of reference available either on google or on spriter's resources sites.

Would have to see this as an animated .gif.

From the looks of it though, you may have more of a knack as an animator than a 2D artist.