Hey shrub, crits and edit:
I feel that your first problem is contrast. Many of your colors, especially in the skin are so close and they blend with each other and the result looks muddy and indefinite. I see you are adjusting hue, and this is good but don't feel that you need such a straight ramp. Different things have different kinds of ramps, skin often has the highest saturation in some of the middle hues. Don't be afraid to go a little crazy with your colors, in pixel art there are so few colors it is easy to modify them. Don't just do a straight ramp for everything.
If you're going to do a style with outlines, then outline! make the outline color far enough away from the others to make it clear that it is outlining the figure. When the outline color is too close to the skin shades, it looks like just another skin shade, but it adds no shadow information.
The legs look kind of bowed out, and those clodhomper shoes are not doing it for me. It is a common style I see in new pixel artists for some reason, making huge shoes but I don't like the look of them at all.
There is nothing that says a straight object must be at a mathematical 90 degree angle! In fact, if you have such a straight object like a spear, I think making it perfectly straight up and down is a mistake, it's boring.
The hat is not lit correctly, if you were going for feathers then it does not read like that, it looks like a jester hat.
Anyway heres the edit, I didn't even touch the hat, and the spear is just a line.
Anyway for someone new to pixel art, not bad at all. Keep up the good work.
