also something i tossed together for fun to show how this guy's evolved over the years

To be brutally honest I think I liked the direction you were taking the character before; I liked the sonic-the-hedgehog-tribute hair and the clothing wasn't ridiculously iconic, but it was still pretty good. You've been taking him in a much more generic direction to the point where now he just looks like a generic post-punk scene kid. This design doesn't really communicate anything about the character except that he's a generic post-punk scene kid... it's becoming even less of a character and more of an archetype. Maybe that's what you want, doesn't seem like much fun to me though. I've seen you do some pretty imaginative stuff so I'm a bit curious as to why you're moving away from that and into the realm of the mundane.

I haven't played all the way through Braid, the only thing that threw me off with that game is the writing. There's poetry and then there's pretentious essays... and Blow falls on the wrong side of that line.

Speaking of indie games has anyone played Machinarium yet? I'm a good ways into it and it's lovely - good example of both games as art and games as a storytelling medium. I haven't been this charmed by a game since Little Big Planet.

The way I see it there are 2 reasons for pixel art:
1: hardware limitations
2: aesthetic convictions

For my job I do pixel art because of hardware limitations. So to stay competitive I'm going to try to make the art look as hip and modern as I can. I don't want people to play the game and think "wow this is so retro! it's like the games I've played 10 years ago!" I want people to think "I can't believe this is running on my cell phone/iphone/DS/whatevs!" So in this case pixel art is less of an artistic liberty and more of a limitation - there's limited resolution so I have to work with that and not against it.

However I think if you're doing pixel art for the purpose of aesthetics you might as well make it look somewhat retro/lo-tech and really embrace the medium. If you want to do lots of fancy realistic effects then make an HD game (NOT as hard as people think) and all the fancy schmancy new technology will be a lot easier to appreciate. Any time I've tried to combine the two I've walked away feeling like it didn't quite mesh, it's two conflicting schools of thought both competing for the same thing.

The issues with contrast, volume and negative space are still just as present now as they were originally. Because hue and volume are virtually nonexistant and the contrast and saturation are very high it makes the image very difficult to look at. Your outline is the only distinction between the different forms and because the contrast is so high it overexcites the viewer's eyes and the picture becomes jarring and unpleasant. But without those dark outlines it would be too faint and indecipherable. I don't understand why you're so intent on doing this. Is it a "style" thing, or is the picture supposed to look like an overexposed photograph? In any case the issue of balance and readability is becoming steadily worse which should be causing a lot of concern.

Hopefully this illustrates the point. the first is obviously your image. the 2nd is the actual abstract 2D forms that the eye sees. the 3rd is a version of those forms with more balanced values to differentiate them. This is not the only solution or even a particularly good solution, but hopefully it illustrates the point. In my last edit this is basically what I did (although I think I made the form of the hair lighter than the form of his face)

Of course the advantage (or the bane) of the pixel artist is that unlike photoshop's resizing filters we can prioritize what details must remain visible, resulting in an image that is "sharper". But if done incorrectly it can merely result in an image that is abstract.