well are you going for realistic proportions?  If you are, you are quite off.  Your figures measure about 5.5 heads.  Realistic proportions are about 8 heads high.
What do the red lines indicate?  Normally we divide lengths according to the height of the head; your red lines seem a little arbitrary, what is it based on?
Your male figure is pretty stiff.  Legs arent perfectly straight like that and shoulders arent so boxy.

The most important thing though is, are you using a reference?  If you want to learn proportions you need a reference, you cant just make it up and hope you get it right.  If you have a reference you should post a link to it, if not you should get one. 

Once you have a reference divide it up according to head lengths, and do the same for your drawings and see where you went wrong.  Being critical and finding where you went wrong yourself will be more helpful than me just telling you every wrong thing.  For example you might count how many head lengths the torso is on your reference and then do the same on your own drawing.  Do this for all body parts.  Look for other relationships too.  For example find how far down the hand goes if the arm is straight down.  Youll notice in goes to the crotch.  Check how wide are the shoulders compared to the hips.  Just look for as many relationships as you can think of.

Also with your reference pay attention to the shapes of things like the shoulders, arms, and legs.  Notice the legs and arms are not straight tubes.  Granted, drawing the subtle curvature of legs and arms at this scale is kind of hard, at smaller scales perhaps impossible.

Are you trying to learn proportions or trying to learn pixel technique?  If you are just trying to learn proportions and anatomy, ask yourself whether pixel art is really your best medium.  As I already stated, the limited size is going to prevent you from being able to draw the subtle curves of things like the arms, and attempting to make things pixel perfect will just slow down your progress.  If you want to stick with digital art, I suggest going bigger and not worrying about pixel level detail.  Or you can try sketching on paper, as you will be able to do them faster and learn more.

If youre going to use an arrow on the other side, I would put an arrow on the side facing us too, just for consistancy.
The stairs could be a little more clear.  I always liked how they did it in Link to the Past
http://www.spriters-resource.com/snes/zeldalinkpast/lttp_castlebasement2.png

heres a few points on your progress so far, as far as getting a likeness is concerned

Another useful thing you can do is taking your pencil and dropping down horizontal and vertical lines to see how things line up.  This is a useful practice when drawing with paper and pencil too.  Since we're using computers to draw though I ussually just take another window and line it up on top of the image since that way I know the line is straight.  the Task manager window is good for this because its already small.

So on images A and B I put a horizontal line to see where the bottom of the ears line up (blue line).  You can easily see how you are off with the ears.  Because the head is tilting back slightly the ears will be a little lower than you might expect, so lowering the ears is one way that the tilting will be shown.

The yellow lines are cut in half at the middle.  You can see on the reference that bottom of chin to bottom lip is about equal to bottom lip to base of nose.  This will make the chin bigger a bit and also make here head appear to be tilting back a bit.

The green lines compare the distance from the sides of the mouth to the sides of the face.  The distance on the left is bigger, but not quite as much bigger as you have.

The features of the face should basically be parallel.  Image C shows how your nose is horizontal while everything else is at the angle.  Compare with the angle of the nose in image A (red line).

I think the boat is almost there.  I did an edit, I dont think the front angle is perfect but maybe itll help still

I think the addition of boaty details like the seats helps too.  It also seems a little too deep for its length, which is probibly inevatable given the square format, but you are able to extend it lengthwise by 2 pixels still, which might help that a bit; worth a look anyways.

thats an interesting idea.  Ill post my results even though when I saved the animation it went too slow also (and could be even worse in a browser).  I viewed it origanally in game makers image editor at a speed of 100 frames per seconds, and the results were good.  I took this image from this weeks challenge:
http://www.pixeljoint.com/files/icons/full/datdood.gif
and then found 2 tone dither patterns that approximated each color in the pallete and made a two frame animation with each from using the new pallete derived from the dither tones.  When animated fast enough it looked basically exactly the same as the origanal image (except that the colors didnt mix perfectly to get the original pallete colors).  This shows that the effect is atleast possible if it animates fast enough, but getting that to happen in a browser is another task I guess.  I guess you could use it in a game maker game using a limited pallete at least
anyways heres the actual images I used



and this one is supposed to animate

(gif made with unfreeze, with frame delay of 0)
If its actualy possible to display the effect in a browser it would be cool if it was actually implemented into a weekly challange at pixel joint, even though enforcing it as a challange rule might be impracticle.