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You're definitely getting better.. I should probably put all this together as a tutorial on the site or something.

Personally, I work better from concept sketches. Perhaps you could bear this in mind. But for now, I think the next things for you to work on are making the poses seem more natural (very few Nintendo dex shots are directly above, below, or to the front, just offset it a little) and perhaps the sizes; the biggest size for a pokmon is 64px x 64px. Only the REALLY HUGE ones (like Snorlax, Groudon, Rayquaza) touch the outer limits of the boxes, and none of those touch it on all four sides.
Perhaps something else to think about is natural forms like leaves. Even though the pokmon sprite style isn't realistic, it's not completely cartoony either. You want your leaves to look like leaves, not to be one solid mass (as Wourm's look like).
A good technique is to zoom out every so often and see if what you're doing looks right. You see how Clawkren's eyes look a bit odd? They don't quite look round. Try adding your darker shade into the missing quarter of each 'square':
Current:


See how they are sort of L or r shaped? Try this:


A square is much closer to a circle, being a shape, instead of an L (which is basically a line). Which leads on nicely, because that second eye, when zoomed out, will look like a black line next to a lighter line. If we do this:


Now withe both eyes look the same, if you walk away from teh screen or blur ist or something, it looks like (as eyes should) there is a sort of dark bowl, sticking out away from us, with a glass bowl sticking out towards us on time. The light is shining on top of the glass bowl (that's the white, since glass is more reflective) and on the bottom of the dark bowl (that's the grey). This is pretty advanced anyway, but it's a nice technique to remember.