I think you've misunderstood; pixel art is not just anything which contains pixels. There is a another term - 'oekaki', often referring to images which, while using similar tools, lack the attention to specific pixel placement like in pixel art. In the submission rules, there's a line which says: "Pixel art implies that each pixel is placed by hand" - this means that you should have control over each pixel on the canvas; keep this in mind when creating things which may be submitted to this site.

It may take a lot longer, -a lot- longer, to recreate this without the aid of the spraycan (or similar) tool, but remember, pixel art is generally not a 'fast art'; you may want to become quicker at producing pixel art, but it is definitely not the primary concern. Perhaps one thing you may want to consider with this piece is reducing its size; 418 x 395 is a fairly large canvas size.

A couple of other issues I will point out with this piece - The planet suffers from banding - have a read of this post from Helm over at Pixelation. Also, I think this would benefit from some less saturated colours, right now all of your colours are at 100% saturation!

I think I see the problem here... I've blurred the line between Pixel art and Raster art. *facepalm* sorry. :b

I'll delete this and get to using a combination of the spray can and pixel by pixel dithering.

The main point is *you* are not placing the pixels. The computer is just throwing pixels around willy nilly. One thing you need to understand about pixel art is the focus on controling each individual pixel - which is something you lose if the computer is randomly generating them all over the place.

Besides, the spraycan effect doesn't really look that nice anyway, it just ends up looking quite sloppy/messy. Here are two examples from the gallery.

Anyway, I'm sending this back for revision. Look at the above examples and check out some images of real planets as references and continue working on it. I look forward to seeing further progress on this.

 I don't see why it shouldn't be classed as pixel art. It's still on a pixel by pixel level. If it was automatic smoothing or antialiasing then I would understand why it wouldn't be allowed but the spray can tool does essentially the same thing and people use that all the time...

Nope. Don't think this will be allowed.  'Randomly jumble the pixels' is not your own specific pixel placement.

By the way I used to think Deluxe Paint was the best, and then I got Pro Motion which is based on Deluxe Paint but better and more suited to modern computer systems.  Most of my old keyboard shortcuts still work on it and when I use it to pixel it feels very much like I did back when I used to spend hours on Deluxe Paint IV on my Amiga 1200.