Well, honestly, the 400*400 illustration you linked is not my taste and is pretty far from being serious pixel art (Painful aliasing, dirty shapes, no shading). It has the feeling of a wanna-be-pixel piece but with no real consideration for the medium. It could have been nice if vectorized but currently Its just a very rushed and pointless pixel result. btw, where did this come from?
On the contrary, the sprite you've created, evokes a pixel attitude, and show, at least, that some pixel knowledge is going on.
The palette still, IMO, need to be cut, giving the details I see, 16 colors should be a real max. Also, Think about using png indexed, as png 32bits is unnecessary when doing pixels.