You get to be my guinea pig for testing this critique thingy. Anyway, I love how smoothly it flows, and that I can pretty clearly see the emotion expressed by the lil' blue dude. It's the proper size and shape for an emote, I think, and the shading (something that I imagine would be problematic in a lot of cases with something as small as this, haha) is nice as well. The only things I see that could be improved upon include the following: Maybe it's just me, but the eyes and mouth seem a bit close together. Again, an emote doesn't have to follow any strict rules for that sort of thing - and this is different from dA's 'official' emotes anyway - but I think it would be a little more effective a couple pixels more apart. Also, while the shading is really nice, I think perhaps it would look more effective if the shading was a little off-center, like the lighting was coming slightly from the side rather than straight in front of the lil blue dude. This would also help the visibility of the face. Also perhaps it might look better with a slightly lighter shade of blue, since the current color makes the eyes and mouth a liiitle hard to see. But even so, overall, this is an exceptional first attempt, and worlds better than I could ever hope to do! I eagerly await MOAR emotes from ye 8D