Arvis Portrait request

I need a good portrait for Arvis for my next video on sprite expansion. I'm going to make him a party character! So any and all takers, please make me something I can share with the world (youtube)!

I tried to make you one. This is Arvis
If you want, I can rework, I made him fast...

if you dont like, there was another one I found on the net:

found this guy on the web n tweaked his hair.. i thought he resembled him a bit

These look pretty good. Let me ask you guys. What process do you use to convert a picture online to a portrait? I've tried but it always comes out REALLY bad. What I tried to do was shrink it a little, sharpen the colors, resize a little, sharpen the colors, etc... until I get it relatively close to the size I need then try to cut the colors down to 16 (including background color), but by the time I get here it looks pretty awful.

I was just wondering how much freehand you do to touch up the picture or if there are hard rules I can follow to make a portrait look halfway decent.

This is the way I do:

First I take a portrait, preferably a drawing.

And then with GIMP I change it to 2 colors. I just keep the black to know my distance between mouth, eyes, etc.

Then I put color on the face and the eyes

And add nose,mouth etc

Finally, you must add shading

That arvis post I showed was not my shading.. I am no where near that good lol. Came from another Snes game with 16 colors.

If you are doing ur own custom coloring it is easier to start with a base like astaroth said. Here is an example of one of my portraits I did. Took about an hour:

Very nice! Badass

Hmmm...I don't use bases at all. I just sprite the outline of the head and blob out where I want the eyes, nose, mouth, and ears to be and go from there.

same lord sutebenu

I go from scratch, which is why I don't take requests lol