Looking for more work

Agreed with Corvidae. Also, don't underestimate the usefulness of stock assets. With some colour tweaks and an eye for cohesion, you can go very far with just stock art.

It's extremely hard to find a stranger who will be passionate for your project. In general, team passion projects arise from the developers all being friends and coming up with the game idea together, before they even decide to become a team. If you don't have friends interested in game art that are willing to develop a new idea with you, then you'll have to accept that whoever you work with will most likely not be passionate about the project, paid or not.

You said payment will make people lose passion, but that passion generally isn't there to begin with. Even working on one's own project, passionate as can be, the lack of income from it can be a passion-killer. It's very easy to get demotivated when you think about how much work you're putting in and how it's not helping with the bills that keep piling up. This is the main reason that if you want free work done for you, you have to find someone who doesn't have to worry about money, such as students living with their parents.


Another option is to find an artist who has their own game ideas, and help them make their game! This'll have the same passion problems, but the other way around - you'll be the one who'll be less passionate. But, there are a lot of artists out there who'd love to make all kinds of different projects, perhaps you'll come across one that you're really interested in. If this is something you'd like to try, then look for pixel artists making numerous similar mock-ups, and put up a post offering your free services for an artist's passion project (specify your scope limits though!). Twitter's great for this, as artists are likely to retweet such an offer even if they're not themselves interested.

I think people are usually on the fence when it comes to "royalties" or "oh you'll get a percentage of what we get". It's just unreliable and people need to pay their bills, so working for free isn't usually an option. Your best bet is to find somebody younger, a high schooler/college student that doesn't need to work full time and might do art for free.

I am still looking for work.

Her facial features are (still) very masculine... Mouth, chin, nose and eyes, brow, jawline... Her lips make it look like she's pressing them together, the nose looks too big. The length may be fine, but it's too wide.

The shading on the left side looks okay, but on the right side it kinda looks like it's been painted, like David Bowie in the Alladin Sane album cover.

It's a hard face to pixel, I've tried multiple times and failed, so it may take a while to get right. But I would put more time in it to try and make it look like her, because it's such a cool character and goes so well with your Ripley portrait.

As for the body, I think Boraka's thread has a great example of how you could shape that in terms of clusters of colors.
Studying it could help you with the hair too, I guess. Maybe you could bring the ponytail forward and over the shoulder like one of your references? You could then use more colors and define it a bit further.


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EDIT:



There, a bit more feminine.
Smaller nose, thinner neck, fewer expression lines, smoother face and rounder, softer lips.
Smaller eyes and irises, and the little highlight in the eye pointing towards us, which somehow makes it look like she's looking in our direction (yeah, I don't know either).


Before/After:


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Another try. Took it as a personal challenge as you may guess.



I tried to reshape her jaw a bit, and to give her a prouder (?) posture. Didn't fiddle too much with it, though.
The mouth is really, really challenging for me.
Hopefully she didn't get that generic mcgeneric face now.