...since you posted, can I have some critique? It pisses me off when people come into my threads and just ask totally unrelated questions...

Was that really necessary?

Even at 200% it doesn't read properly. You will need to include more of the leg that's further away from us. It's not the angle that's a problem, just the leg - besides that, it looks like the rest of the sprite is aligned well. Right now, the mage looks like he is leaning forward very far, probably far enough that he wouldn't be able to even balance.

I think it looks quite good at it's size and amount of colours, but might benefit with another highlight like Joshua demonstrated. So you could get away with one extra colour for sure, and then see if it would benefit adding another one. Joshua really captured the eyes well which I think is important because it gives her face a feminine look, even though as EvilEye said her face isn't extremely feminine. But it's these subtleties that communicate to viewers that it is a female. (But to be fair, makeup is often what gives the strong female looks for a lot of girls.)

I think the problem is more of a doesn't know how then doesn't want to use. I'm still generally new to character creation and pixel art in general. Though I know enough to hob slob something together. And from what I've read, there's a certain set of rules that must be followed. Things like all terrain must be 16x16 or 32x32. All characters must fit in certain boundaries or it won't look right. Only 3/4 colors can be used or it won't look right, etc. I don't know what I'm trying to say here. I guess that whenever someone presents something different, or uses strange words that I've never associated with pixel art before. I guess I don't get it or something. Maybe I need to re-look up stuff again and see what I missed. (And throughout all what I looked up. Not once did they mention classical arts or anatomy and other things like that.)

Rules and restrictions are only there when applicable, when necessary. The reason a lot of pixel art 'rules' existed wasn't because there was a way to define pixel art, it was because of the limitations of earlier computers and gaming consoles. You can see in this board and the Challenge board that sometimes for fun, people will create pixel art that adheres to those rules pertaining to a specific console or graphic mode. Terrain being 16x16 or 32x32 is similar, it's part of how a game engine may function, grid based movement or maybe it is better for memory optimization and cutting down on slowdowns in game creation on older platforms. These give us not quite rules but more-so standards that people like to follow, and in some cases really it's just practical and makes life easier. Like the colours, sometimes a high number of colours just isn't actually worth using and pixel art looks much nicer using less colours, not specifically 3 shades each colour but just less colours in general. This is also again restriction for game development, like if you were creating a 256-colour game (where full rendered Photoshop graphics obviously aren't an option).

Hope that doesn't come off as ranting, just trying to provide some information to help you see that there are only rules because computer/console limitations enforced them, but because of the art that was produced with these limitations there are now standards that help us to identify pixel art, to see how we can push pixels around manually to create effects, to understand what works and what doesn't. I don't mean that pixel art is a mathematical science like drafting/technical drawing/perspective/architecture. The standards are something to keep in the back of your head when working, not something to work religiously by.