At 19.5k you have two options.
Option 1) A larger, colorful, & legible avatar that is not animated.
Option 2) Animated, few colors, and small. The more frames of animation you have, the smaller it has to be in order to fit your filesize requirement. You can make it large enough to be legible with a couple (2-5 frames) of animation.
My avatar is a 64x64px 7kb png file to give you an example. (I am curious how jct74's avatar is 104 × 115 pixels. Is that a perk of being a moderator?)