Well, I'll go through them one by one:
Resolution: When I started making this game, I was coming from exclusively making battle sprites. These, in Essentials, are 96x96 px - so that was the canvas that I was just the most familiar working with. The earliest portraits in this game all use that model (as do the unused Leaf portraits from ~2023 in the files). As I continued to step away from battle sprites & into my current style, I settled into my current default size of 108x108 px. But that canvas size isn't hard set. There are characters with large hair, or weird posing, or any number of reasons that I extend the canvas out by a few extra pixels. This is probably the difference that is the easiest to see: in my old work, 96x96 was IT. If something hit the border, that was that - no cropping, because I didn't have that luxury for battle sprites. It was, again, what I was used to.
...I've also just gotten better at fitting things into my default canvas, anyway.
I'm assuming you're not accusing the portraits that are very obviously intentionally taller than the rest? The ones that stretch from the thighs up are 108x~160px... but these ones I am very liberal with extending/shortening if I feel like it will better serve the piece. I've got space to spare in-game, so if the piece becomes better by giving myself those extra pixels, it makes total sense to me to do it.
Details: I think this is the change that is most prevalent in my progression. If you look at battle sprites, the color palette is very limited, and shading is blocky with the occasional checkerboard shading. It very quickly became apparent that this didn't look great for the portrait sprites, but I didn't yet know what I needed to change or even how to change it. My solution was to use photoshop as a crutch & overrely on the pencil tool's ability to hue jitter, scatter, etc., and then come back with some blur and layer styles. I'll keep it a buck, looking back at some of the early stuff in this game is hard for me now. There's a lot that I would do differently if I revisited those sprites today. I think if you look at the sprites chronologically, you'd be able to pick apart a pretty clear sequence. The tough part of viewing this game as a whole package is that you may not necessarily have the context that the first demo for this game was in "development" (and I do use that term loosely, because it mostly refers to the art & possession battle mechanic) since the end of 2023. I've had a lot longer than I think a lot of people realize. Here's a good example I can give you. The XY Ranger's Gastly portrait is one of the earliest surviving pieces in the game. It was done, at the earliest, in spring of 2024. The second portrait is an upcoming portrait of the same character that I did two weeks ago. I think it explains a lot:
Consistency: This is a fair thing to point out. Details, especially small ones, are tricky to place when you are working with canvases this small. My job - in my opinion - with pixel art of this scale is to get things close enough that your imagination does a lot of the heavy lifting for me. Moving details by even one pixel completely changes how a piece looks at this size. Some of that, though, is definitely a skill issue on my end. But, like all skill issues, it is one that I would argue I'm demonstrably getting better at as time passes.
As far as the "and similar" goes, I'm really not sure where to go with that. I think the biggest takeaway is that you are seeing a huge chunk of my timeline in this game. I've redone some of the most egregiously mid sprites already, but a large portion of that early work will likely be memorialized in the game forever, for better or for worse.
