I'm not a mod, but I suspect it might be the lighter colours mixed into your AA'd areas (such as under the left eyebrow and under the chin), which make it look like you used a sharpening resizing algorithm to create your AA. You also have a few colours that only occur in only a few pixels and could easily be replaced by other colours in your palette, which looks suspicious.

One "trick" that could help get rid of noise (the principal thing that makes your pixel art look less hand-crafted, on top of simply not being good in most cases) is to find pixels that aren't part of any cluster, and see if changing them to be the same as the surrounding colour would make a noticeable difference. If it doesn't make a difference, then do it. If it does make a difference, then that pixel is probably detail that you should keep. For example, that light green dot by the eyebrow doesn't add anything of value to the piece, but the nostrils obviously do and should be kept.

I also think you could safely lose the shading(?) on the clothing, as it's barely readable as shading (it's noticeable only upon zooming in several times, at which point it still doesn't quite sell the form). The fabric is dark enough to not need shading.

As for colours - I don't know what problems specifically you felt you had with the colours that you had to add single-pixel bits of other colours, but to me it looks like the main issue is your green colour ramp is boring because there's no hue shift. That's not something that would contribute to your work not being accepted, but it is something to keep in mind when dealing with colour problems. Often, the solution is more interesting colours rather than more colours.


Edited by eishiya - 20 December 2014 at 11:28am

I thank your feedback, I might have added colors carelessly when trying to make it look smoother, but I actually don't know how to find out how many times I used a certain color in an efficient way, It takes me a lot of time. when I made the gif and saw I used 28 colors, it seemed reasonable to me so I didn't think much of it.
Now that you mentioned it I noticed the 'light green dot' It's the only part under the eyebrow that I didn't color so it stands out. I made this for a computer game I'm making so I wasn't that worried about efficiency, I thought the shade on the clothing helped form the hands, and add texture to it, I admit I didn't spend much time on it.
I made the ramp from green to grey to gold to green to white, and whenever it didn't look smooth I just added a color in between. I started making a running animation, but now I'm not sure, maybe I should rework this, it would probably take a lot of time but it could be worth it. What hues would you have added and where?(by the way PSD saved it a bit desaturated than how I made it)

Since the golds/olives are all used separately from the greens, it leaves the greens lacking in hue shifting, it's a fairly straight, dull black-green-white ramp. The hues you introduce into your palette should depend on the look you want, so my preference is irrelevant. It's also not a matter of "adding" a hue (sounds like you're expecting to add more colours?), but rather shifting some of your existing colours towards another hue. One of the strengths of pixel art is you can replace colours easily, which facilitates experimentation. Since you're using some gold colours and already have some red in the lineart, perhaps shifting the darker greens towards orange/red might help? Might be challenging though, since those are complementary colours.


Edited by eishiya - 20 December 2014 at 12:22pm