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I think there's 3 things that would improve this piece a lot:
- More contrast.
- More focus on pixel clusters. Dithering is very hard to do at this tiny scale, and I feel you have a lot of noise that disrupts the shape from your big clusters.
- Getting rid of the dark orange / brown you've used to separate the dark red and bright red / orange.
It currently has 11 colours, according to the Image Specs Tool, which is in Features. 
The face seems a bit long compared to the ref. The eye is transparent, I don't know if that was intentional?
Hmm.. i think the top part of the hair is pretty well done.
And yeah, it has 11 colors, since the transparency count as color. This may help you a lot.