You'd benefit if you did unrelated, pencil and paper anatomy study with a book or something and then returned to pixels. Then you'd know what sort of posture you're trying to absrtract from to get a small-scale sprite. As it is, he's got horse legs (seem to bent inwards, massive hips, hoof legs) and generally the posture is very girly. You need strong arm placement, confident spread feet in a upside down V and so on. But even if you fix that for this sprite, you'll learn a bit, but the best way would be to buy an anatomy and human construction book and start doing every excercise. I promise it's a better way to learn than struggling with the added difficulty of how much a single pixel out of 16 changes everything in a sprite posture.