Hi there, nice to see you! Looks like a great avatar to me!

it does look like you!

but less saturated colours, a bit more contrast and a bit ifdark red in your hair and it'd be better!
i don't recommend dithering for when you do portraits. keep up the good work! :)

Oh thank you! Actually, the more I look at this pic, the more it seems to look like me. Talking about your self-portrait, I love the colours, they give it more realistic look. My style has always been more cartoon-ish, so there's no wonder it looks a bit flat. Btw, here's the reference: http://s008.radikal.ru/i306/1104/eb/58d2c4327722.jpg

I used it only as a base, not trying to copy it one-to-one. Still, I suppose my face turned out to be recognizable.

hello alina. i noticed you added my self-portrait to your favourites, so i thought i might give you a hand with yours:
http://i.imgur.com/wyhIf.png
basically, your face lacks contrast, so i had to make the levels higher. the shading is best on the hair, but it could still do with some more highlights. as you can tell, the transition between the hair and your face is quite sharp: this can fixed if you use an intermediate shade between the tone of the skin and the tone of the hair, or if you make the contrast between the hair and the skin less great.
as for likeness: likeness, as you know, is something very hard to achieve. in order to get a likeness, you need to be very observant on proportions; for a face, i would suggest you look at the distance of an eye to your nose, an eye to your mouth, an eyebrow to your eye, from one eye to the other, etc. fortunately, using a digital photo as a reference when doing pixel art makes it a lot easier, as it's static!
anyway, i hope you can improve on this!