[alarid0]

I made an edit to your piece.

First, I need to touch on the black lines. Wherever you go you'll probably hear "don't use black outlines!" and in this example it's very important to avoid them. When you're making such a small sprite, a solid black outline carries a -lot- of visual weight. You need to try and define the form with blocks of colors instead of fill in the line style coloring. (mostly looking at the handle, here)
Try not to equate "fine detailing" to "alot of single pixel weight lines" Even if you arn't dealing with solid black, many lines of color with a decent amount of contrast surrounding it gets very confusing, the form becomes a little lost in it all...I'll post an example later tonight, I still struggle sometimes with it. You want something that's detailed, but done in a way that you can see it and its detail from glancing at it. I think I'm making the single pixel line thing a bigger deal than it may be in thise piece...but still, the reason I'm saying this is because of the shading in the metal. On the sharp blade edge, everything is so scattered and it looks like noise. On the darker part, it isnt bad, but I just want you to realize that you don't see anything other than one tone unless you get close to the screen