Lately I’ve been working on learning pixel art & animation, hoping to get my meager skills serviceable enough to make the art for some old school video games. This one’s my first attempt at a person, from a picture of me after biking up Mt. Rokko many years ago:
Image

I’ve received a lot of great advice from a coworker who used to draw 2D video game sprites and was able to put it to work. The first piece of advice was to pick a base color for each part (skin, hair, clothing, etc.), paint the part with the base color, and then go through with a highlight color and a shadow color to give it depth, while keeping it simple. The second piece of advice was to shrink a photograph of a real world object/person way down and zoom in to grasp the basic shape in terms of pixels. And of course I have the internet to thank for a lot of things, one of which was the method for resizing a sprite in Photoshop without it going blurry (Edit -> Preferences -> General : Change Bilinear to Nearest Neighbor)

With enough practice, I hope I can make creating 2D assets a little less painful when the time comes.