Help on making Avatars

I could ask this in the request thread, but I'd rather not bother those talented people with my noobish questions.

I'm not very skilled with Photoshop, but I had a decent enough knowledge to make some avatars for GFF. But with the new 20kb rule, I've had some hurdles in creating avatars that look good enough. As you can see with my current AV, the results are a pixelated mess.

Normally what I do is first crop the part of the image that I want, then after some image adjustments, I resize it to 105 x 150. After, I save the picture as a jpeg, then adjust the quality when the bar appears. But with the new rule, I've had to lower the quality all the way to 1.

So how do you lower the pixel count to 20kb, but still have a clean looking image? Please give me any tips you have.

Most amazing jew boots

Awesome. Thanks for the info, and double thanks for the avatar.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I tried saving it as a gif, but the filesize was over the limit. I have no idea how to adjust the pixel ratio in a gif.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.