Hey everyone!

First of all, I apologize if this is in the wrong forum, I was looking at the categories and this one seemed to be the best fit, please excuse me if I was wrong in that assumption. 

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I'm having a little trouble with a possible artistic choice for my pixel art character that I'm using in Unity and was wondering if I could get some help.

Basically put, I have this sprite with transparent skin:

Now, what I would like to have is an animated sprite "behind" her that moves as she does in a Platformer game so that her skin looks like a galaxy slowly scrolling and changing colour as she moves around. Attempting to do a Sprite that fits perfectly where the alpha is, does not work as the size (32 x 32) basically means zero detail in the "skin" sprite. 

My next attempt was to have a Sprite Mask with a much larger image only being displayed within the sprite mask but this causes problems for animation.

Any thoughts on how to accomplish this? 

Thanks!

So, you want an animated low-res sprite with high-res skin detail?  Am I understanding this correctly?

The obvious approach would be to take the low-res sprite, scale it up to the size at which it will actually be displayed in the game, load it into an image editor, and draw the "skin" of the character on another layer.  Would this work for you?

If you want the skin to animate independently from the character while keeping the skin mapped to the character, another approach would be to use texture mapping.  Convert  the character into a flat 3D model where each source pixel is a quad, and start assigning uv coordinates to the skin pixels.  Then render the result with an animated texture.

Ah, I'm sorry for the confusion, yes, the skin would animate independently from the player. 

I'll give your texture mapping idea a go, thanks for the suggestion!