My First Character Sprite - A Moorish Merchant

[ronaldaam]

So this is my first character sprite.  I first rendered him in grey scale then went back and added color.  I'm using asesprite software and this is the third file I've attempted.  I couldn't figure out how to switch color modes, so I copied and pasted him into a new sprite file.  The painting on the right is the reference I used to make him.

Eventually I want to animate him dancing around and singing to get people to buy from his cart.  He's a traveling merchant so I will be adding a horse and cart eventually. 

My questions are these.  I want a minimalistic style so I don't want to add too many colors and details to describe the character.  Do you think I found that balance or would you make changes?  Do the colors work?  I really want to make the feather on the hat iconic, any ideas how to enhance it?  I'd like the character to spin around and dance and jump to a song I wrote.  Do you know of any reference sprites that I could study?  Finally, how do I make the character look less generic and more iconic?  The painting shows a lot of personality and I'd like to show personality in this character as well.  Thank you!

ronaldaam

[Rydin]

I like this. 
There is fine tuning you could do to increase the readability. For example, the necklace has a few too many sharp pixels that could be smoothed out into antialiasing instead.
Make the feather bigger. Exaggeration is the best part of designing a character!
Also when you animate it you can make it bounce and that will pull a lot of attention to it.
Consider if you just did the silhouette of the character. All #000000 black. From this you can build simple exaggerated shapes. If you can make it recognizable from here, then filling in the details is easy.
Add cape flowing behind.