Kawaii! I definitely love the expression and feeling captured. For a large pixel art, it definitely doesn't feel like its missing any detail either.
That's some good advice and something I find myself struggling with as someone who previously always shied away from coloring. Creating appealing color palettes is really one of the hardest steps in my opinion.
Anyways, thanks again for the advice and I hope the edits I made based on your suggestion helped. I actually used a program to count the colors now to make sure I get the right number.
I'm glad you found it useful!
In general, I guess the advice I mean to give is that you shouldn't focus so much on making things the colours that they "should" be. Just because two objects are different colours in "reality" (or in a design) doesn't mean they have to be in your artwork (and vice versa - two identical objects can have completely different colours depending on their location!). Thinking more in terms of the general hues you need rather than in terms of discrete objects and their colours can help you choose colours that are more unified, even in situations where you're not aiming for a small palette.
Another thing to keep in mind is colour relationships. The same physical colour can represent many different apparent colours just by being positioned next to different colours. You've probably seen examples similar to this before (source: this amazing art tutorial). This isn't limited to just greys! Green can look blue next to yellow, or it can look yellowish next to blue, for example. The same pink-ish colour can look like skin shading or the highlight on a red apple... You can use this to inform your colour choices too. Aside from the obvious use of keeping your palette small, being mindful of such colour relationships helps you keep your palette pleasant, avoiding colours that clash with each other.
First thanks for the tips :)
I must have miscounted the colors, sorry. I think I might have accidently used a few colors that
were only a few shades off the ones I already had. I'll have to look into that.
I did indeed AA while making the piece since I completed each section of it before I moved on to
the next. That might also be were I accidently added those very close to each other shades of colors.
The picture you showed actually uses some of the colors in quite smart ways that I wouldnt have thought about, like the highlight of the cap being the secondary color of the shirt instead of its own color.
I'll get some of those in to reduce amount of colors :)
The Image Specs tool says this has 68 colours, not 54. Either way, this image really doesn't look like it has 50+ colours, which is a sign that you're not reusing colours as you could. I see you reused many colours already for major objects, but you created a lot of new AA and detail colours instead of reusing suitable colours you already had. For small things like AA and tiny detials (like the lines on his ears), the exact hue often doesn't really matter, because it's not visible until you zoom in. This makes them poor candidates to get their own colours.
Here's an example with 47 colours (a reduction of 21 colours, nearly 1/3 of the palette), using only colours that were already in the palette (that is, without changing any of them to be more reusable): http://i.imgur.com/u5RcBjX.png
I am not as familiar with your image as you are, but the only difference that immediately stands out to me between these two is the brighter highlight on his cap. The rest of the changes seem quite subtle to me.
Did you, perhaps, do AA as you drew it, instead of waiting until the end? It's much easier to avoid extra colours if you do small details and AA at the end, when you already have lots of colours to choose from.
Your style is lovely (: