That girl looks horribly distorted. Your edit very much refined the face, but it emphasized the distortion in the process.
Large head, long neck, ok.
Shoulders and upper torso are a little smaller, eh, ok.
Lower torso is crushed, and worse, flat. Maybe she is wearing a high-waist peasant dress, but the lacing and belt are perfectly horizontal and flat, and the foreshortened arms don't help.
It looks like amateur work where the artist started at the top and ran out of room.
Recommend total rework of the lower torso and arms, possibly resizing the head and neck too.
Colors:
I know you said you didn't want to change the colors, but it deserves a comment. You've got 3 lights, one medium, one medium dark and black. Trading a light for another medium would help. Maybe a slightly red, slightly darker than the current medium color. This would give you a darker red to ramp with the pink and work as an AA color between the brown (medium dark) and gold (medium).
I almost posted this yesterday (twice). Maybe I'm missing the point somewhere. Helm, you're a much better artist than I am. So why avoid fixing the colors? Or the basic shape problems? I don't see charming, I see mediocrity. Please tell me if I'm completely wrong, but this could be made so much better with significant rework.
Anyway, here is an edit, using your colors:
- Redid the face with generic cute girl face #612. Gave her plump cheeks to emphasize youth.
- The head is smaller by 2-3 pixels which lets it fit the body better, and the eyes line up with the horizontal brickwork line on the right.
- I went larger on the eyes. I think this size is right at the border between one pixel larger and one pixel smaller for the size of the eyes. Without any more colors to make a half-pixel difference, I went larger.
- Cleaned up a lot of the pointless dither on the chest, collar and neck.
- Partial rework on the dress. Pulled the top of the dress up a pixel or two. Shaved the shoulders a bit. Tried to keep the torso dithering like the original, but my dithering skills are poor. Here is another spot for a second medium color, because if you squint at this, she looks topless. Not what I was going for. Also, lighting is inconsistent with the jaw/neck lighting.
- Arms still need a ton of work, they just look terrible.
- Still some banding and whatnot to cleanup.
Ok, tired of working on this. Leaving it even with the arms so terrible. Really needs one more medium shade.
Tourist