newbie presenting fad avatar (still fad?)

[Loenie]

Hello, first post
 
I'm Loenie aka Luniz male 37 Netherlands. My introduction with pixels was a few years ago making small pixel cars called manga cars (based on kurukuru models).
A few months later I found the old pixelation board and some weeks after I joined pixelation was offline.
It killed my motivation making pixels until recently (newbie need C+C to improve work).
I just started with some basic animation on my avatar, then I realized that I would like to hear some C+C on it first before animating w.i.p.

[bengo]

You are now a pirate, you gain +10 Manliness.
Now onto being serious, the main problems I'm noticing are proportions, contrast and just the overall knowledge of the human head. I'm not sure if you used reference, but if you did, let me see it. Now there was someone who had a pic of a head's proportions earlier... lemme go try and find it... aha:

[Loenie]

Pirate loenie far away from the Caribbean.
 No time for a vacation yet.
Ok reference. I started with a photo of myself in a stupid and wrong position for my avatar.



                                     

(I didn't have a better positioned recent picture of myself).
I'm not good at making drawings so I had to start with something I could reproduce.
Looking @ your reference picture I think I need to twist my head a bit before I can get everything anatomical in place. This will be pretty tough on me but I will give it a try.
My eyes are probably to small at this point or at least they are for a bit more use in animation I figured. Lookin'at the pirate Contrast in my face makes a lot of difference I guess makin'it less realistic and more cartoon like.

To show you my limitations in drawing here's a Porsche 917 LH my first pixelwork. Made it from scratch a few years ago i'd probably lose the outline if I had made it recently. I might work on it another time.



p.s. you really think I needed those manliness points ?!!