first pixelart need advice

[keren]

Hi, i'm new to this board and say u got some awesome art here.
I stumbled across this board because I'm trying to make a avatar of myself and got stuck drawing hair und beard.
Maybe someone has a little advice for a noob.
Also I'm not sure if the color are so good (Set myself a limit of 16, still some free).
Here the current WIP :
and a foto of myself for reference.

[Ar]

Too tired for write but made crappy edit. 



Imho better but not good after all.

[qunit]

Hey Keren

first fo all you need a lighter pallate, i mean look at your reference : you are not that red...
secondly - you need to change your texture style if you are going to draw skin. look at the reference, it doesnt seem like your skin is "holed"... its more smooth.. try to use let dots-things on the face

overfall this is a VERY good pixel art for a FIRST one..
keep up the good work

[keren]

Thanks for the advice, I'll try "cleaning up" the highlights.
Ar's colors look nice on the skin, I think it got to red because I started with an EGA color palette .
I'm still not satisfied with the hair, think I'm going to practice a few versions tomorrow.
This takes longer than I expected, but is fun and I'll keep posting the work as it evolves.

[keren]

Took a while until I found time to work on this again. It looks like this now. But I think there still lot of room for improvement.

[skamocore]

great start so far, I made an edit:



*Removed a lot of the dithering. The main problem is that it gives your skin a strange texture as qunit said. In fact all the dithering makes you look a lot older, as though you have really wrinkly skin.
*Placed it on a more neutral background. This way your face stands out more and the background doesn't get in the way.
*Tweaked the colours a bit.

Also one thing which I didn't really fix was your lines, you should try making them less jaggy, especially around the right side of your chin.