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Very nice for a first attempt!! Your main issues are pillow shading, jagged and inconsistant edges, and high color counts.
Pillow shading is when you choose a light color and put it in the center, and then use darker colors until you get to the edge. Pillow shading looks unprofessional, doesn't display the lightsource or portrays multiple light sources, and tends to use a lot of colors.
Which brings me to my next point. This uses 92 colors, which is far to high for something like this. Here is a version with only 40 colors! High colors can be avoided by picking out your palette before you start. You can tweak your palette throughout the piece, but be sure to change the colors that you have already applied. And be sure to use the color picker (eyedropper) tool.
On the top line of the main body part of the female anteater, you can see that darker pixels are near the edge of the line, and the lighter ones are in the center. This is wrong! It should be the other way around. AA (anti aliasing) can be used from the lighter colors on the body to make it look smoother, assuming that you're keeping the white background. Some jagged edges on the body when transitioning colors on the body of the anteaters are pretty jagged too, like to the right of the male anteater's left foreleg.
Other than some other anatomy issues, this is very impressive for a first attempt. You can take any future pixels to the WIP thread if you want some hardcore critique and edits.
You might also have to add a transparent background. White backgrounds that serve no purpose are usually not allowed into the gallery, but if you're willing to add AA to this, you should keep it. If you're using MSPaint, transparency can be a problem, but easily solved! If you're using GIMP or Photoshop, just make sure your layers are transparent when you save.
Cheers! :D
oh my goodness, i wasn't expecting such a detailed reply! thank you for pointing out these issues, i will try to deter myself from making the mistakes in the future. it'll probably take a while before i fully understand anti-aliasing though hahaha...
and yeah, having a white background wasn't my intention, so i've downloaded giffy. :)