Had a few minutes, quick ideas for the 1st pilot
Basically took this one apart, redid the shadows/highlights, used less lines and more clusters.
EDIT: 2nd:
Same thing, more animu.
BTW when you come across a detail hurdle where you could end up with a lot of single pixel noise (like the eyes) cut it down to 2 or 3 colors and see how far you can go before adding more.
Try indexing similar thumbnail-sized images down to a few colors and referencing that. Usually more detail is omitted than you expect.
HTH.