Scrombo

One thing a lot of people do for palettes is apply one characters default colors to another character.  You get some interesting results that way, and just being immersed in that process and experimenting can help with your own creativity.  Like Imagine if you did a Hulk colored Blanka, or visa-versa.

Portraits are another thing that are pretty easy.  You basically just find a good looking picture of the character on google images or wherever, crop it to the part you want, get it to the right resolution and clean it up and make it look nice.  You can make sets of those relatively quickly and easily, and it can help train your eye as well, especially if you listen to peoples feedback :) 

im glad it helped, it took me almost 13 years before i ever truly contributed to the community ( i was known as a notorious warehouser back in the day of Esnips lol) but ive made a few single layer stages ,then moved onto palettes were i found my niche , you'll find yours 

Thank you, guys. It's the supportive comments like these that keep me going.