These are all great looking. The shapes are nicely distinctive, and your demon weapons look much better than the current ones.
I hope you don't mind, but I sort of redrew one of your axes. Somebody on Mantis pointed out that your tiles clash a bit with the current style, but my concern is just that, in my opinion, they would look even better with a little more confidence and clarity. It'll be a dark day for pixel art before I'm any sort of authority, but hopefully it's at least helpful as an example of how one guy does things.
The main things I changed were:
- I used only a little anti-aliasing, and no transparency at all. Anti-aliasing is great, and jaggies are bad, but two or three pixels along the "jaggiest" lines - where the contrast is highest - are generally more than enough. Lots of pixel artists hate transparency; I personally don't mind it in small amounts, but you've got basically every single border pixel at some level of transparency, and that tends to make things look mushy, hesitant, and ill-defined. Strong lines give your item a shape and help it stand out from the background. I actually went out of my way to make the line between head and blade even
sharper than it would otherwise be, since that's an area of low contrast, and I want to draw the viewer's eye there.
- Your axe has tons and tons of colors. Again, that's not a bad thing inherently, but having tons of tiny variations of a color sort of tricks your brain into drawing things in a really flat way. The head of your axe has lots of interesting detail, but it mostly dissolves into a grey mass at 1x1 scale, since all the colors are so similar. I find it's much easier to get my point across and keep things crisp when I only give myself a few shades of each color to work with (in this case, my version of the axe has nine colors, including the black outline).
By the way, I used to do all of these things
exactly the way you're doing them. The stuff I did for Battle of Wesnoth has more shades of grey than that one bestselling romance novel. I would draw a line, then mess with it for ages, going back and forth with transparent erasers and pencils until it was as smooth as I could get it. But that was kind of a crutch - my stuff looks a lot better now that I've learned to get by without it and be confident in what I'm drawing.
Anyway, that's just my take on it. This stuff all looks amazing in any case; it should definitely go in.