Ugly Face Icon - Tips

[Wizard-Fu]

Hello!
I'm veery new to Pixel art, and digital art as a whole... I'm stuck on a face Icon. I don't really know what to do next... Maybe someone can give me a few tips?

I'm going for a fairly realistic look.
 
How could I improve this?
 

[HarveyDentMustDie]

For a start, find some good reference, it'll help you with the facial features (cause this looks more like a mummy face). Also choose position of the light source, and add shadows accordingly. Try to change colors to make it more alive. And you should invest more time and more effort in it, you can just draw for 5 minutes and give up...

[Wizard-Fu]

Hmm. I was going for an ugly, old face, so mummy sounds good haha. I added another colour to show what I was going for lighting wise. a dark overall picture with little light coming down. Creepy-ish, get it?

[HarveyDentMustDie]

May I ask you how you drew this, because you don't have only 4 colors (like you've presented in your pallet) but more then a few hundred of colors. If you zoom in you will see a ton of pixels with different colors. If you want to do pixel art, first you need to know what is it, and how to create it. Read some tutorials, it may help you...

[r1k]

looks like he just saved as jpeg, which creates noise.  never use jpg for pixel art.  use png.

[jams0988]

May I ask you how you drew this, because you don't have only 4 colors (like you've presented in your pallet) but more then a few hundred of colors. If you zoom in you will see a ton of pixels with different colors. If you want to do pixel art, first you need to know what is it, and how to create it. Read some tutorials, it may help you...

If you'd read a few tutorials on pixel art, it would have been obvious to you he simply saved it as a jpeg, or his file host compressed his image on him. = =;;
Even his palette, which you said has "four colors" has like five thousand, because of all the artifacts. = \

Is there any reason you're doing this in pixel art though, Wizard-fu? If you're learning to draw faces, wouldn't pencil and paper be better?

[HarveyDentMustDie]

@jams0988
First, you should read more carefully before comment, I didn't say that he has 4 colors but more.

Second, It's my bad, it didn't even crossed my mind that he saved it in .jpeg cause the first thing I you learn in pixel art is to save it in .png or .gif. r1k corrected me, so I didn't had to post the same thing again.

And finaly, you can hate all my post as long as you want. It's your problem.