Spriting

I've never sprited before in my life. I have a newfound respect for the artists I worked with in my other games. That being said my spriting skills will continue to improve and I will be able to work faster. I already realized several things I could have done different in order to make this sprite faster. I feel like the color pallet I chose is a little boring for her so I tried to give her accents of blue and red. Altogether this took me close to three hours to do, simply because I was trying to figure things out (I didn't know about the pencil tool in photoshop till half way through).
I am thinking of using a higher resolution simply because I felt really limited with the amount of detail I could put in without it looking too weird. In addition this doesn't look very smooth. Currently the dimensions are 132 x 175 pixels. and a 72 dpi. I'm wondering if spriting is the only way to do a 2d game because a lot of 2d games I see nowadays look a lot smoother and clean. It probably just takes a lot of practice. We'll see how things go as I continue development. I think the worst part about spending so much time on this sprite is that I did it in the wrong camera angle. It's supposed to be done in an isometric view and this is a 3/4 front view.