I’ve finally finished the phoenix! After finishing shading, I separated the key elements—head, body, wings—into different layers so that I could animate easier. Then I used the select tool to move and rotate the parts before fixing up the pixels. Unfortunately the wing feathers look wonky, but I’m not too sure how to approach that.
After implementing ease in and out, here’s what I’ve completed:

• An idle animation (first four frames, and then reverse)
• An attack animation
• A transition to glowing eyes!
• A sudden burst of flame

What I’ll be working on:

• The background pixel art
• The projectiles
• The boss health bar

(The video has a clideo.com watermark because I needed to compress the video :( )