Artists are free to use stock photos as a reference when they want to study lighting/shading and gesture.
There's a lack of shading on the legs, boots, belt and chestpiece that seems out of place with the rest of the piece. On the arms, torso and pauldrons, the lighting/shading is very sloppy and doesn't do a strong job conveying where the lightsource is coming from; it seems to resemble pillow-shading where the highlight is contained in the middle of the form and the shadow around the rim or edge of the form. The picture looks like a traceover of promotional artwork for a game or show.
To make this art your own, you should be looking into how to break objects down into more manageable shapes, such as spheres and cubes, and then looking into how light bounces off those shapes. Again, artists are free to look at other art for inspiration, but it helps to have an idea of construction and lighting to understand why other artists make the choices they do, rather than copying blindly.
The head has had some very strange editing applied to it. The reason I don't know why, but you've produced something with misshapen pixels and mixed different resolutions together. This is ultimately the reason I can't let the piece pass; it goes against the spirit of limiting yourself to a low resolution to begin with, and there's a lack of cohesion where the various parts of the face and the rest of the body don't mesh together very well.
I would recommend you look into the basics of both drawing and pixelart, and try your craft again from scratch to make something you can call your own and be proud of.
http://gas13.ru/v3/tutorials/sywtbapa_almighty_grass_tile.php - a long and useful series, mostly on background graphics but also character sprites, discussing some little tricks of using small colour counts (taking pixels out of an outline or changing the outline colour to suggest details)
http://2dwillneverdie.com/tutorial/ - lots of incredibly useful information here, from turning drawings into sprites (when you already have a strong grasp on drawing to begin with), to keeping your palette while painting your sprites, to subpixelling, lots of handy articles
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