Thank you! Don't feel bad for your critique; I'm not at all trained in anatomy or really anything like that, so this is all pretty new to me. I've looked on here for a few lighting guides but I haven't found anything that really helps me get to the level I want to.
Do you have any suggestions on what I could do to improve this in the future? (I read somewhere that everything I upload has to be a finished product, so I don't think I could reupload this.)
If I recall correctly, the picture I was studying had light somehow on the inside of the ears, and I was trying to work with a limited palette to put in that lighting, Maybe it's a color choice problem?
Looks quite good to me. I don't quite agree with the way you've added shade and highlights to the face though. It's like you've made his whole head like a cylinder, without taking into account which facial features would catch more light, and which would be left in shadow. Given that the light is coming from above, for exampe, you would expect more light above the eyebrows and more shadow around the eyes. I also wonder if it would have been cooler with fewer bumps on the head, and then paying more attention to how you shade each of them. Finally, I don't quite understand your choice of colours on the ears, because the insides of the ears seem brighter than the outsides.
Just my humble observations, I'm not very good at drawing faces (or statues) myself.
You can still make changes to the image after it's been accepted. Just click Edit It and upload the new version.
To learn how to do faces well in pixel art, you shouldn't really look for pixel art tutorials. Just google 'drawing faces' or something like that, and you'll find a bunch of written tutorials or YouTube videos. And just study other people's drawings. And practice drawing on paper, if you have the time. When you learn how to draw faces and apply light and shadow with any medium (pencil, charcoal, photoshop, whatever), you'll know how to do it with pixel art. Pixel art just makes it even more complicated, that's all.
And no, color isn't the problem for the ears. It's the luminosity. The amount of light is the most important indicator of shapes.