That's a lot of improvement! Runensucher is absolutely right about my edit being in a different style. Your initial doodle already had a lot of good stuff going for it, and the ways in which I adapted it aren't universal advice. I'll try to go over why I made the changes I did, and hopefully that'll help you.
When I talked about the proportions inhibiting cuteness, this is what I meant:
The face on the left has pseudo-realistic proportions. The face on the right has all the features moved down and the eyes slightly enlarged. This advice doesn't work universally, but generally we find proportions like these cuter. This is also true of head to body ratio; we find larger heads cuter, probably because we associate these proportions with babies.
If you look at the source material for reference, you can see that moogles were designed with these proportions in mind.
This design has a big bean-shaped head with low facial features and a small round body with cute little limbs. The sharpness of the ears and wings accentuates the roundness of the head and body.
Just by emulating the moogle design, your sprite already has a lot of these traits. This is a matter of personal taste, of course, and my modifications of your sprite were pretty extreme, but I find that I even prefer a version of your sprite with minor edits, like so:
I just moved the face down a couple pixels and used the shading colors to round out the body a little. EDIT: and messed up the wings in the process because I wasn't paying attention, oops
Your colors are already looking much better, so I'm not sure any tips from me will help at this point, but I'm happy to share my process.
When it came to recoloring your sprite, I saw that all of your shading colors were very close to each other on the color map:
So first, I cut out all the super-similar colors:
Then, I reshaped:
I decided that the black and the purple were rarely used and pretty similar, so I combined them, darkening the purple and making it bluer so it could be easily distinguished from the red. I didn't know what kind of background you were eventually going to put this piece on, so I used my new dark color to add an unbroken outline, because dark outlines go well with most backgrounds:
I knew from experience that because the red was between the purple and the cream in both hue and brightness, it could be used to soften the transition between them. Some of the transitions were still too harsh, so I selected another color between the cream and the red (again, between them in both hue and brightness) and used it to shade/add detail, resulting in my final sprite:
That was a reenactment of my actual process, which involved more trial and error at each stage. I guess I figured out my colors by working with your colors! This particular ramp works because each color is darker and closer to purple than the previous color. By going yellow-orange-red-purple, we make a smooth transition.
Let me know if I can clarify any of this. I'm interested to see how you progress on this and other projects!
