which pose did you rip from? could you post your reference pose? As your own character, you should consider attempting your own pose.
As for the pixeling, you fell into the most common beginner traps:
1: not enough differentiation between separate colors. You have many colors that the eye cant distinguish without straining. Generally in pixel art we try to keep every color in our oh so limited palette as important as possible. The more important you can make each individual color, the stronger your palette most likely is
2: too many colors. This is a result of problem one. Because so many colors you have used are unimportant to the whole, you have to add a bunch more colors. This is bad in pixel art, because pixel art thrives as an artform that is fundamentally based on control...Control of every little pixel, and control of every single color. Less colors in a palette means you can control them better and use them effectively.
3: general pixel technique issues, which just means because you are new to pixeling, do not yet have a grasp on how to place pixels efffectively. I suggest if youre serious about pixeling read as much as you can of this amazing wayofthepixel thread:
http://wayofthepixel.net/?topic=8110.0 If youre not as serious, know terms such as AA, banding, dithering, and most importantly,
pixel clusters. you'll notice the best pixel art focuses on creating beautiful clusters or groups of pixels that interlock in harmonious ways. Yes, it is about moving single pixels, but realize it is about moving single pixels
into harmonious clusters of pixels.
Here's a sprite edit I did yesterday that you can think about these 3 points over. My edit is on the right. You'll notice the original sprite had many colors, and many of those colors are hard to even tell theyre different, such as the huge number of very similar whites. AVOID! In my version, you'll see the palette is much smaller, and for the most part, every color is distinguishable, save for where it was appropriate to have similar colors. This means by nature I was forced to think about my color choices so that i could do more with less colors.
Also pay attention to how the original sprite has sections where pixels seem to lack control, such as the wrist holding the knife. There are a bunch of seemingly random colors and even a lime green that is hard to tell what's going on. Here, there is no sense of piels belonging in a cluster, but rather look like what Jalonso calls a "pixel pudding." I tried to fix this in my edit. Notice how every group of color is better separated into clusters that are well molded by good ol manual labor pixel pushing. The end result is a better sense of control over the original sprite, so at least in terms of the pixel technique could be considered an improvement.
