Borrowing my old high school friend's dragon Sol Invictus for practice. He's real happy with it. :)

The original uses 18 colors @ https://imgur.com/4TjnN1H, but halfing it doubled the energy.

Here's the result of 3 days' practice of building a color ramp with unexpected midtones and high contrast to achieve that classic pixel art "look." It's so challenging! I also practiced suggesting texture instead of wallpapering the guy with scales.

Originally, I tried using warm grays and blues in my red-scale and am pretty proud of how it turned out. After some palette swapping and repixeling, I settled on something close to the default Graphics Gale palette. The injection of red in the gray-scale has a more dramatic effect with less colors. I admire artists who build high-impact palettes instinctively and boldly.

You can see more Sol @ https://www.furaffinity.net/user/invictos/. Lol, yeah, he's a furry.