Massive improvement. Way to stick with it.

Yeah, I does get rather nasty zoomed in. Not totally sure what to do about it, I wanted to avoid using the same skin colors as the others, and I wanted the face to be backlit. Reads alright at it's intended size, though. 

I did indeed use a mirror, photos, etc., as references. The picture was more for the tophat and glasses. The likeness is enough that my sister thought it was a shopped photo; she doesn't really get pixel art.

There's already a hue shift like that there. I'll push the darkest shade further purple and see what it looks like. Speculars where, the meat? I haven't settled on shading for his muscle lumps. I'm pretty happy with how the chewed up meat on his forearms turned out though.

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I took both your suggestions into consideration, pushing the purple and greatly increasing contrast.

Changes:

• dithering experiments
• saws embiggened
• dark colors saturated
• refined shading
• red-yellow ramp ---> purple-yellow
• Palette/contrast tweaks, color balancing
• saw experimenting

Alright, I've been staring at it so damn long there's no way I can make any objective headway on it for a few days. Could be finished? No idea at this point.

Next up Bellyache. The original design:

Is that enough contrast, or more?

Narrow her shoulders. As it is she has some hella beastly terus majors and trapezii. Trapeziuses. Whatever the plural of that word is.