"You're doing it wrong." :( And unfortunately, not matter how well you render the detail on the character, this is going to look like crap because the motion isn't right. So here's what's wrong and how to fix that. The huge, cripping flaw at work here is that you're afraid to let the path of the sword cross the player's sprite; whether intentionally, or by sneaking, psychological influence, that's happening. And what it's doing is forcing you to put the swing in a completely, totally wrong position in order to meet this unwritten rule you're following - a position that looks very physically awkward, because anyone swinging a sword in that way would fall on their face, given how far he comes off-balance. Given the isometric perspective at work here, 1] even if the character is leaning forward, we should still see his legs, and 2] the sword's "swoosh" should be as high up on the character as his belt-line.

It's a common neurosis amongst advanced beginners to avoid covering up any part of a figure that's already been drawn; or to avoid having some part of the body obscured by another part as the body rotates. It gets ingrained in people really quickly, because most forms of illustration make it extremely costly to draw over something that's already there - in a pencil drawing, if you want to, say, put a big kite shield in a knight's hand, you have to completely erase everything behind it. In a pencil drawing, this is especially expensive, since everything has to be drawn from scratch. If you erase what's behind that shield, you'd better hope you're on the right track, because

This isn't so bad in a computer-based drawing, because things can be undone; either by pressing undo, or putting your changes in a new layer, etc. In fact this gets back to one of the more interesting secrets out there - so long as you've got decent input tools, like a drawing tablet, computers are actually one of the best tools for learning to draw, simply because you can make so many experiments in such a short period of time. It's completely different from a pencil based drawing, because even doing a little experiment that takes only five minutes to draw on it's own - if you have to erase something you've already drawn, can set you back by hours and hours. On a computer, you can try these experiments fearlessly, knowing that you won't screw up what you've already done. Even one of the most basic operations is hugely more efficient - if you misplace a stroke in a pencil drawing, you have to stop, grab your eraser, and then grab the pencil again; which takes some 4-10 times as long as just tapping undo (this is assuming that like me, you have your left hand permanently sitting on the undo key and modifier keys, whilst your right hand is busily drawing away.



I digress, though. For a simple study image, look at this series of animation frames for the general from Wesnoth. (If you want to see it in action, just download a copy of the development version of battle for wesnoth.) Note the path that his sword takes while swinging through the air.
Image

Try something like this - you need to do major, invasive edits to make this look right, but it's worth it, and it's good practice. Give it a whirl.