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Here's the method I use for spiky hair:
Start off by using lines to place the "skeleton" of each spike.
Fill in the areas between each line. Make sure to keep the ends of each spike thin, around 1-2 pixels at the most.
Heh, okay, I did quite a bit of editing in this step, I'll try to explain everything. Please note though that I have zero experience with with RPGs, so my edit's not as good as I'd like it to be.
The first thing I did was step up the contrast on all the shades. The shirt especially was suffering from the dreaded low contrast syndrome -- if you look at the first two, it's hard to tell that there's any shading on the shirt at all. Just turn up the darkness of those shades a bit to really make them count.
Next I added some hands and tried elongating the legs. The hands are there mostly because I though it looked kind of funny having those long sleeves with nothing coming out of them. They are oversized quite a bit for emphasis. It would be easier to show him swinging a sword or something when his hands are clearly visible. I straitened up the legs and added a black foot. Hmm, looking at it now, I think the foot makes the legs look a bit to long. Anyway, the original guy's legs had a bow-legged cowboy thing going on. I tried giving him more of a regular stepping motion. If you meant for him to have a horse-riding-syndrome style to his walk, disregard my edit. :)
Finally, I added some black around the hair to make the lines more recognizable. I'm not sure if I can clearly explain why I didn't just outline the whole thing. I picked areas like the curved part of the shape the arm makes to emphasize the curve of the lines. Like on the hair and arms I left a few lines as they were without going over them in black -- that way the color and shade can do a lot of the work the outline could do as well. I'd better shut up now because I'm confusing myself more than I've probably confused you, heh.
Oh yes, I forgot to mention the face. One most sprites I've seen, faces are shaded differently from the body. The light usually comes from a more central point, rather than the top or sides. Keeping this in mind, I pretty much eliminated most of the shading. I think the reason having just a tad of shading around the face is because it makes the details inside the face clearer.
Also, I obviously added some details to the eyes. It was fairly simple actually, just white 2 pixels on the side and 2 on the top for eyebrows. It gives him a bit more of a human look and less of a stuffed doll look. :)
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