To draw anything in life you'll have to make a soft overlay with pencil.. or you can think it a lot through before you do it. But itīs easyer if you make a quick overlay of what you'll be drawing.
In photoshop you can use layers, and put the soft overlay on top of everything to have as a reference.
Since we are using layers.. we can make the sprite in layers, drawing it by parts. This time i start with the head. Itīs better if you draw the base color, itīs quicker this way rather than shading it from the center outwards.
For the hair and eyes we stay on the same layer, unless you'll want to switch it with several eye sets, then you could try making several eyes in several layers.
Now that the first part (the head) is done, you outline it. I recomend you dont outline everything black. If you outline it with black.. it will take too much attention because of the contract.
The face wich is skin color is outlined with brown. The brown hair is outlined with black. For blues you use dark blue.. for red you use darkred.. etc.
Now that we made the head lets make use of the soft overaly.. wich is kind of a skeleton we use as reference.
Now you can move on to other parts. Like the torso.
Then you draw whatever parts are left.. like the legs.
This methods is really fast for making sprites. After you finish it you can take 5 minutes touching the sprite up until it looks how you like it.
To make more sprites that look of same exact style, what you do is erase most of it.. leaving the key areas unerased. You leave only the areas that will not be modified.. or will suffer very little change.
In this case i left the feet, the hands.. and the face. But i erased the eyebrows because i will want to give the new sprite new eyebrows.
This is 20 times better than your article that reccomends making a blue dog, but I would have named this article "How to make a sprite," for this article discusses sprite assemblance procedure, rather than drawing technique.