Casting with and without the brush

So to recap, Ella will be starting off in the game world without the 'magical brush' so there needed to be a whole other set of animations with her not holding the brush. This, in truth, was pretty easy, it was just a case of taking all the animations I already had and deleting the brush from her hand. It was more of the duplication of all the images which added on to an already mounting file size so I have to keep the storage use down somehow to keep the game running smooth. I'll probably end up saving everything in a PNG format so that should solve the file size issue.

Anyway, here's the animation sprites for Ella when she's casting with the brush (for the sprites without, just imagine no brush):

Is that jumping?

Errr, honestly I don't know what to make of this one. Really, I have tried to make it look as natural of jump as possible but I'm not entirely convinced. Maybe it's just me over-analysing it or maybe I've just been looking at it that long that it's starting to look so, so wrong. Kind of like whenever you read a word over and over until you've begun to question it's existence in the Oxford Dictionary as a legitimate word. Or maybe that's just me too...

Moving on:

I mean there's two things I need to take into consideration here, the first being that Ella won't (normally) be jumping this frequently so it's unlikely to be a major concern. The second being the fact that even while typing this, why is the animation so nauseating? Hang on, let me find a bucket (and maybe scroll down past the animation).

Where was I? Oh yeah, the second point is that while I'd like there to be more frames to properly portray the jump and fall, I get the daunting feeling that it may become a hassle to code so I'm going to want it as simple as possible without going into too much detail.

Now, where's that bucket again?