Very nice! =) Only things that bother me are the blush as mentioned before, and the eyebrow-over-top-of-the-hair thing. The reason the blush looks funny to me, I think, is because it's so much darker in the middle that it looks like a bruise or a monster pimple. The Heidi pic you posted only has one shade for the blush and it works much nicer.

You might could go for black pupils, though I guess I don't know if that's within the anime guidelines ^_^

The top two are my favorites -- sorry for not offering any pixel-level crits but right now I am in a mood to just look at pretty pictures 

it is Sean Bean!

So I am working on a computer program, and in this program, there is a bar. It starts out with a base color, and people must be able to paint segments of this bar with one of 15 other colors. I am looking for a good pallete for this, and it has the following requirements:

1) The base color must be very distinguishable from the other colors
2) The base color must look like it's in the background
3) The other 15 colors must be distinguishable from each other and from the base color
4) None of the colors can be white or black, since I use black for outlines and white for the overall background color of the application

While I am working on this, I am using the c64 pallette just for fun ^_^ The problem is that, while it is a good pallette for art, it isn't a good pallette when you want 15 distinguishable-at-a-glance colors.

Anyone have a suggestion for me? =)

It looks good =) Of course, I am brimming with ideas to make it looks even better.

I advise getting rid of the inner black outlines, instead using a darker version of the adjacent fill color (dark pink on the shirt, dark grey on the hat, dark dark gray on the pants).

Also, pure gray is usually not the best choice -- even very gray looking material in real life tends to have *some* sort of hue.

Agree with pumpkin about the smoke - it doesn't look bad, just not a lot like smoke (I know from experience that smoke is difficult to draw =p).

You did make his legs too short ^_^ But if you're not going for ultimate realism, I'm of the opinion that it doesn't look bad. Cartoony, but not bad.

The arm with the cigarette is too short, though.

I also think that his back shouldn't be a straight line. It makes the piece look artificial.

The darkest shade on the hat doesn't show up very well.

The bill of the hat looks...well, I dunno how to make it look better, it just looks funny ^_^

This next issue might be intentional, but his head looks a lil' bulgy. On a 3/4ths view like that, the outer eye should be pretty close to the side of the head. Look at your own face in the mirror at that angle and you'll probably notice that outline-curve is very different from what is in your pic (mostly because on a real face, the cheekbone sticks out and the eyesocket curves in). I hope that made sense =P

I personally think he should have ears ^_^

I'm also going to tell you what I tell just about everyone =P Increase the contrast! If you're going to have shadows and highlights, make them count for something


And about dithering in general:
Dithering should be used to suggest texture, or to blend colors. The colorblending isn't an issue here right now because the contrast is so low =) But as far as texture goes -- his hat, shirt, skin, hair, pants, and shoes are all dithered with the same pattern. This suggests that they all have the same texture, which is not what you want. Try different dithering patterns (not just checkerboard) and also try no dithering at all. If his pants are Corderoy (I'm not going to try to spell it properly, I'm hooked on phonics) then they'd have a different texture than if they were patent leather, and hence a different dithering pattern (patent leather, of course, would also have sharper highlights).

And finally,
I just realized something that looks wierd. His waistline bulged down quite a bit -- this suggests that he has a bit of a pudgy stomach. However, if he had a pudgy stomach, it would curve out on the sides as well, but it's perfectly square and straight. (This is part of why the straight spine looks funky).

I hope that helps you. =)