I know exactly how you feel! I feel like some people just sort of fill their post up with things that are wrong with the piece, and don't offer ideas or resources to help you impove! Also I don't like it when people DUMP a whole lot of bad stuff about my artwork, I'd rather see someone make small suggestions so I don't feel like have to do as much to "fix" the piece. I have noticed the same thing in my thread, and since I am extremely easy to offend (when it comes to my pixel art) I have to give myself some time to cool off before I reply to any critiques made

I must warn you though, after I put my rant up in the beginning of my thread, not as many people commented. So be careful about things like that. After a while I realized I'd rather have someone telling me everything thats wrong with my pieces than nothing at all

Anyway, I love your sparkly dresses! They are a good shape (something that I've only seen on one item on Mene) and also well put together . The fold at the bottom of the dress is really good, and the folded part at the top of the dress adds some real character to the piece! I really like how the dress has been coming along!

Some ways to improve them: Any fabric behind the base should have minimal shading/highlights. So I'd suggest making the back of the dress (behind the legs) to have 2-3 colors maximum. Also, I'd love the sparkles even more if they weren't on the fold in the dress.

I actually found this tutorial on adding sparkles to doll's clothing, which is super helpful! I may not use gimp, and I can't use the exact technique this tutorial uses, but it helps me understand that a majority of the sparklies should be on the lighter parts of the fabric. I plan on making a doll with glitter someone this year

Glitter tutorial.

Also, on to your questions:

Mene style clothing is 6 colors, although there are a few clothing sets on Mene that use a few more colors, it all depends on the piece (if there's a gradient to it, if a softer appearance is needed for the piece, etc). At this time I think any pixeled clothing made by users needs to stay at the 6 shades of a color to keep it's fluidity. The style needs to match existing pieces, and the easiest way to achieve that is by having a defined dark outline and 6 shades of a color for parts of the piece.

At least that's the way it will stay until someone can prove that using more will in fact keep the fluidity of the articles of clothing as well as be very appealing to the users . (I think mixing palettes would be interesting, like combining a white pallete with moonlight?)

Yes, slightly transparent pieces shouldn't be a problem. We do have items that are transparent in some parts, though I'm not sure how they get them to be that way on the website . Although, I have found it very annoying when the outline of the item is transparent, I think the outline of the item should stay non-transparent so that it's easier to see where the item ends at with a clean line (much like our clothing does).

I don't think animated items are possible in our avatars (or if they are it would probably not be very good for our servers). We do have items that have animated icons in our inventory tabs, but they don't actually animate on our avis.

-wipes brow- Ok! So if there's something you specifically want me to comment on, just let me know. That sparkly dress was the first thing that popped out at me