Pixel Art Character Portrait

[TGames]

I have been thinking of making a Quest for Glory-Esque Point & Click Adventure/RPG with turn-based combat. I want to include companion characters that would fight alongside you. In the party menu and during combat, you and the companion characters would be represented by portraits akin to old-school RPG games. An example is shown below.



I made this for practice.



Does anyone have any comments on what I can do to improve the look of this? I am pretty set on wanting the front-facing angle, but I want to know how to make this portrait look better.

Thank you

[Matti]

I made a quick paintover, maybe it helps.






- I added a darker skin color as well as a darker hair color
- I slightly tweaked other colors. The problem I see is that you have a very high contrast between colors (the darkest vs. the second darkest skin color) as well as colors that look very similar (the two skin colors with average brightness).
- I changed the eye color to a dark grey and added a little brighter dot, as pure black is not a good choice.
- I made the shading and texture asymmetrical, because perfect symmetry never looks good 

[TGames]

Thank you! that definitely helps

[cat]

The eyes are quite high in the face. Usually, they should be about in the middle height-wise.

Example from the web:



A search for "face proportions" will bring up many pics.

[TGames]

Thanks!

[Khris]

My first paintover in years



I somehow saw him as an elf-type guy so went with that.

[Chomba]

I think a good way to get closer to the original style is also to use the same colour palette.
Here I took Khris's drawing and applied colours from the palette that were in the screenshot you posted... then I got excited and kept adding details and doing some changes to the elf's design