Facial Anatomy

[zeid]

The progression so far:
->->
You might be able to get some understanding of my approach from the images.

Any and all C&C welcome and encouraged.

EDIT:
Progression;

[xiphirx]

;0

You're over here too? D;

The nose looks too defined, and the eyes are a bit too small imo. The neck shouldn't be completely shaded also.

[zeid]

You're over here too? D;

Yup, just haven't been doing much pixel art for a long time.

Cleaned up a lot of the dithering and out of place parts.  'undefined' the nose a bit, made the eyes look a little more wide, might tone down the highlight on them a tad later on.
->->->

The neck shouldn't be completely shaded also.

The neck hasn't even been started on yet, I wanted to get the face looking good first.  Not sure if I will ever get around to pixeling it.

[Rydin]

Not so much a pixel critique, but I like the second version the best.  It's got the most character in the facial expression.  The ones that follow it are cleaned up, yeah, but also blank.  It all depends on what you're going for, I guess.

I also enjoy the second one because the highlights on the chin are the least symmetrical.

If it were mine, I would take the mole like in the third version, and then emphasize the highlight on the left cheek like in the second one, and then clean up some of the dithering like in the last version.
 

[zeid]

Colour reduced:

[CrazyMLC]

I'm impressed. My own experiment with facial anatomy didn't go quite so well.

In my opinion it looks a little too gritty, though you fixed that a bit in your latest version.
I really like how you used dithering on the hair to give it some texture, it works really well.
It looks slightly over-detailed, causing him to look sort of old.
He lacks expression of any kind, which is kind of creepy.

EDIT:
Also, the ears seem a bit low.

[xiphirx]

The eyes look odd, its probably because they appear circular...

[zeid]

eyes fixed?

[Helm]

I don't know how you're helping yourself with the technical pixelly wizardry what with dithers and interlace dithers on something that needs more clear planar work and unambiguous detail. Also your palette is very high-end of the range, is there a reason for this? my edit has a levels adjustment but the proper way to fix this would be to add more colors and recolor parts by hand.



Try not to mirror the lightsource exactly so that every part of the face sides is lit the same, not only it almost never happens, it makes the face look flat. And the best part about faces are that they're not flat at all.

[zeid]

Colour swap and better lighting approach as per suggestion, I'm a little reluctant to add more colours, but I know what you are meaning in saying it.  Also more cleaning up of the dithering.

forehead felt flat, so I resorted to adding more dithering: