One thing I'm a little confused about is the bottom of the hair. It's in a ponytail but it seems to end on both sides of the head. Was that intentional?

Thank you for your compliments and suggestions!
The hair on the sides is meant to be some hair that isn't on the ponytail. This is the hairstyle I wanted to do:


I couldn't find a way to make it clear this was the hairstyle in the portrait when drawing it.

I made an edit but imgur wont let me upload it :(
Basically. I would keep playing around with ideas on the hair, but my main concern here is the eyes. they make her look like a zombie, more contrast in there, add a brown dot in the left one and work on the shape of the right side(dark side), in my edit I touched up on this but It won't upload.

Got it!


Edit:
Did a bit more, gunna stop here though. Good luck!


try to avoid that pillow shading on the neck

I don't actually see a difference? did you post the wrong one?

Ok here it is.
I loved the new dark shade you added on the hair so I went for it. I adjusted the shading on the neck and added the new strands of hair on the forehead which I loved. I have a few questions though. First, what is the point of the AA round the shape of the head? I understand when it comes from the darkest sides like bellow the ear but the ones near the chin seem arbitrary so I wanted to know your thought process. Also, what is that shading you added on the left side of the face?

The purpose of all that stuff I did on the right side is too make a the shape more feminine, You might have noticed that I moved the shape inward 1 pixel right around the cheek-line. Makes the shape more anatomically correct. Another thing I did was add a shadow from the hair on the left side, and got rid of the 1 lone light skin tone arond the right eye. I also would recommend not using the whitest white for the right eye, It can be distracting. Another note, the collar on the neck shouldn't be that dark , maybe make the collar light and the shirt dark.. Up to you. The newst version is looking great. Hapiel also brings up a great point. Great improvement so far!

So the point of destroying the outline there is making a stronger form, with just an outline it can come across as very rigid. which a females face generally is not :).

I mean, there isn't much improvement you can make beyond hapiel's crit, to me the piece looks Complete. Of course nothing is truly perfect and you could spend hours just changing 1 pixel's at a time, but it looks like a very good pixel, even the starting one could have been considered complete.


The new face look's more realistic, which is good. I met a guy in a character design class once. In this class the teacher seemed to take a more classical approach to the class and it almost felt like a Portrait class. Where as a lot of the students who enrolled were looking more for a cartoony style. He would after every project, which was usually studies on another drawing of a character that spoke to the student. Say that his drawing isn't good and he is more of a cartoonist, and after this for awhile I remember the teacher telling him that drawing is drawing, no matter what. a good artist can draw what they envision in their mind with accuracy cartoon or not. The kid seemed demotivated by this but he was one of the only kid's who expected a less classical art approach who actually stayed to the end. And he improved greatly which I respect him for.

man-women, who cares the pixel art looks great gj.

Well done on changing the direction of the hair! I think more highlight can go on the top and less on the side of the head, but that is also a style choice.