Thank you for the advice :) 

Your'e right. That's a nice find!

Making the palette in advance can give you an idea when you're being redundant with colors, yeah.

One thing that occurs to me - because I wanted to figure out how the official Cynthia sprite pulled off the blonde hair - is that there's a similar lack of contrast between the skin and hair colors there, but it's less visible because the hair is outlined:

Thank you! 
Yeah I need to study colors a bit more. Do you think there could be something learned by using palettes first?

Hey, this looks pretty good. One point for improvement might be the colors here - the blonde hair is fading into the skin, and there's not a lot of contrast between all those light shades; meanwhile, the dark clothing is really drawing a lot of attention to it.