NES Samus

[Chris2Balls [:B]]

Unlike the other sprites posted above, black is neither an outline nor one of the colours that make up Samus's palette: red, orange, and green are. Black is the background colour of the game.
Consider the room your sprites take up: do you want to pursue this path, otherwise optimize the original space, or, like I have attempted, use less blocks to convey more information?

Look carefully at how colour was used more to differentiate the different parts on Samus than to shade. Why was this done? There weren't that many colours to shade, without messing up the readability. You can see this attitude changed: as the consoles got more powerful, the artists were more liberal with the growing colour palettes.

Anyway, you're making good progress!