Howdy! Something that might help you here is to start looking up some more standard art tutorials. Pixelart can seem appealing for beginner artists (myself included) but it can lead to some problematic art habits and difficulty starting over to learn normal art (also myself.)
Speaking from that experience, it may help to start small with some spheres and cones and cylinders to get a feel for shading and thinking about objects in 3d space, then move on out to normal figure drawings (quickposes.com, google) or still-life sketches (google random objects) to familiarize yourself with drawing normally and build some maneuverability in your skillset.
Pixelart is in essence a sub-set of cartoonism (at least in most cases) and understanding how to draw in a more standard fashion translates to that very well. There's plenty of good books on the subject, but I'd start with what I'd listed and come back for those.
Learning art is going to be pretty time-consuming, but don't give up! There's a lot of fun to be had with art, be it drawing out fun fight scenes straight from your head to pouring your emotions out into surreal landscapes and scenes.
As for the current piece, I reccomend using higher-contrast colors so the skin and hair don't merge together with the skin. Try to set up some cross-bar guidelines (seen here:
You can simplify this to a simple cross so it fits the constraints of pixel art, but using guidelines helps ages even for more experienced professionals.
Yea I need to stop supplementing shading with shapes, especially at the scale I'm working because it's easier for me to draw and animate smaller stuff. The problem is colors, and I don't think any color tutorials ever helped me.. I'd rather see examples of artists showing color selection and how they conclude them instead of huge technical explanations, maybe that'd help but idk.
Pixeled anime faces are a very specific art. I think one of the best things to do is look at some inspirational examples. This artist has a lot of great ones:
http://pixeljoint.com/pixelart/88778.htm
http://pixeljoint.com/pixelart/98265.htm
Work on improving your fundamental art skills so that you have a solid base, and look at work like this to improve specifically in this subject.
So both only have single colored eyes, whereas it seems I'm trying to cram all the literal detail when it's not needed? That and I'm probably not considering the loss of detail through distance. I'll just call it an 'artistic' decision, mine being more cartoony and less dramatic
Everything else is beyond my scope to even progressively examine atm, hopefully sometime I can learn from it though.
Might give another edit, but I have shading to do!