These are both great looking stylistically, but you have some inefficiencies such as too many edge loops and the second character has 1 too much texture sheet.
Only model out and keep edge loops that benefit and define the silhouette. Try removing some edge loops and if they do not affect the overall silhouette of it, then leave it out.
I actually like your style, but maybe paint your textures more painterly as if its was painted with layers of paint and showing some of the brush strokes in them would really push your texture and the style in which you have to model the characters.
If you're going on the character artist route, knowing anatomy is a must. So you should show that you do. Look up references, medical and artistic, and study up on names of the bones and muscles and their functions.
In summary, you model with too many edge loops. Style is not bad, but push it more. Do some anatomy studies.
Your polyflow is actually not all that bad, like the other said you can get the same results with a lot less polys and smaller texture sheets. I wouldn't go higher than 1024 for these characters and that is pushing it a bit. I don't know if you've seen the Polycount wiki yet but it can definately help you with your next character.
With that first character, you've got all the colour changes lined up with the polygons, so with a bit of creative UV-mapping, you could map it all to an 8*8 instead of a 2048*2048. That would make it very interesting from a technical standpoint as well as from an artistic one (and you'd save just under 12MB of memory one every character!)
Replies
Only model out and keep edge loops that benefit and define the silhouette. Try removing some edge loops and if they do not affect the overall silhouette of it, then leave it out.
I actually like your style, but maybe paint your textures more painterly as if its was painted with layers of paint and showing some of the brush strokes in them would really push your texture and the style in which you have to model the characters.
If you're going on the character artist route, knowing anatomy is a must. So you should show that you do. Look up references, medical and artistic, and study up on names of the bones and muscles and their functions.
In summary, you model with too many edge loops. Style is not bad, but push it more. Do some anatomy studies.
Good Luck!
Your polyflow is actually not all that bad, like the other said you can get the same results with a lot less polys and smaller texture sheets. I wouldn't go higher than 1024 for these characters and that is pushing it a bit. I don't know if you've seen the Polycount wiki yet but it can definately help you with your next character.