Get coffee, for there is critique.
- You don't need all these colors at this stage. I know how you like the hue shifts, but until you can get the geometry you need with 4-5 colors, all the subtle tints won't save it. Don't try to cheat with flash, you'll end up like these demoscene dudes that can pixel amazing but if you put a paper and a pencil in front of them they revert to drawing like they're 5 years old. You can be better than that if you don't try to cheat yourself. Pixel tech is all well and good but traditional skills will get you places.
- Don't even bother with antialiasing and dithering until you're done with the volumes and shapes. Come on
you've heard this a million times in this forum, I bet you've said it to people yourself, heh. - Don't draw hair and other things that partly obfuscate your shapes until you have your shapes down. Work on a larger canvas than what you're making will need. Be confident and comfortable with how your percieved model would sit in real space in the position you're drawing him in.
- Anatomy: a lot of people have mentioned the lack of hard edges, so I went ahead and introduced a bit of that. The way you shade is very marshmellowy. You should instead hunt for edges and crevices in your hard male dude face and put highlights and darkened triangles to signify the variations in angle. The nose you used was completely invented so I generally suggest: draw from life for a while. Forget the anime, it'll probably hurt you to fetishize faces so early. A lot of people do (I did) and then we have to unlearn for 5 years, slowly, heh.
- Your aa is too heavy. This is a matter of preference of course, but count my vote as against.
Now here's encouragment: I am glad to see you try new things, even by way of anime. I think instead of following my edit you should look at it and think "had I not seen it, what skills should I have in order to have made these changes on my own? Do I need to study real faces? Do I need to study objects in 3d space hit by a lightsource? Do I need to read the prometheus tutorial again?" and so on, heh. I'm not saying don't reference from my edit, but try to understand why I changed things, that is, if you think I changed them for the better. Once you get over your pixel art extravagant phase you'll realize that actually a lot less is needed to make a picture successful than you initially thought. Once the forms are solid, the anatomy there and it emotes something, the rest are just coating.
BTW version 3 is a color corrected one, just to show that you need more dark tones than you need mid-tones right now. And you have waaay too much light, but overexposed is a look that some people like, what do I know.
