I second that.
A few more things -- the hair/beard has a highlight shade that is near-impossible to see unless you zoom waaay in on my machine. You definitely need more contrast there as well. Same with the goggles' shiny parts on the lenses too.
You probably want to also keep the shading consistent across the form, depending on the material. For example, are those blue-jeans or are they supposed to be silky/shiny/plastic pants? -- if they're blue-jeans, they probably shouldn't be as shiny as plastic.
I may be wrong, but it seems like you may confused as to how many shades to use in what areas. This is a common problem to people new to pixel art. The confusion about the number of shades to use seems to spark from terminology like "16 bit" and "8 bit" -- these terms really have no bearing on pixel art or the number of values in your shading. Yeah, you can mimic these hardware limitations, and in some cases (upon color reduction usually) this can indeed affect the number of the shades available to you, but pixel art in and of itself is completely independent of these self-imposed limitations. Even back in the NES days (true "8-bit" btw) attempted to break these shading boundaries whenever it was possible (or necessary) to do so, and they did it in clever ways -- but the difference between them and modern pixel artists is that they never did it to adhere to any sort of "style" -- instead, they did it to keep to giving the viewer a "sense" of whatever material it was they were trying to convey -- and this, I feel, is where you're stumbling a bit. You have no sense of "material" on this character. That is to say, the blue-jeans (assuming they're blue-jeans of course), don't give the sense of a diffuse/rough material with the roughness you'd expect -- instead, they're super-shiny (and, if you've ever studied lighting, that means they're super smooth), and despite them having ridges in them, that *alone* doesn't give any hint of whether they're rough or smooth or metallic or furry or whatever. You need to shade them as the type of material they're made of -- THAT is what determines the number of colors/shades/values you use -- nothing else, aside from intentionally breaking this rule for reasons of either hardware limitations or (*clear*) stylistic choice, should determine that.
I hope that helps "shed some light" on this topic, for you, or anyone else, reading. (sorry, couldn't resist the pun... ^__^ )
This design/pixelwork looks great otherwise. Kind of reminds me of the "Black Dynamite" character a bit lol.
