I love this so much I faved it right away. I agree with what everyone's said about the colors and negative space too--but I think his left shoulder (house right) is conspicuously lacking AA.
This is Lovecraft, isn't it? Very nice AA.
I'd pick different colors though... the ones in the preview look better.
Yup! This is not remotely the right medium for this style. I was just having fun.
I have mixed feelings about this one. I did a lot of black-and-white drawings with india ink and a brush, so I can really appreciate the outline, obtained by the conscious decisions of where to draw the line between all-light and all-black, the respective volumes etc. But I feel you just wasted a lot of time by doing it directly at pixel size, fitting PJ's standards... IMO, on computer, such monochrome art should be done at high-resolution (just big enough to be able to work the details you want), and then when you're done, to put the picture on display, use bilinear interpolation to automatically get a smaller image. Yes, this would be outside PJ's scope for pixel art... I just see very few advantage to manual antialiasing in this piece : OK some lines gain crispness, but in many places the AA is less-than-perfect and it looks like a smear. I just mean digital monochrome painting is fun too, and I have a feeling this piece would be even better if you had made it NPA.
Great job!
I'd love to see this with some reddish saturated AA à la Panda. Might make him really alive!
Fantastic one... It reminds me of a two colours spray painting portrait of H.P. Lovecraft I've done a couple of year ago...
His face is tall, so a relatively tall canvas probably helps, heh. I already a know a wide canvas would destroy that affect ( and probably make his head look less tall).
Nice AA hatch, would be interested in seeing the purple-blue version too, though.
Yeah. I think the extension of the background to such a height helps reinforce his expression. Having that cold green color on the face against the warmer browns and yellows gives me a sense of uneasiness, like you're expecting something bad to happen the moment you look away from the portrait.
Excellent work Hatch! 
Cool.. would make a good vector artwork too. It looks alot like a bitmap with a thresh-hold filter applied to it and then traced in Flash.
For some reason, the prolonged yellow negative space really helps this peice out. Could be the combo of green face and yellow background helping each other. But there's something else. Can't quite put my finger on why, though...
dat right shoulder >:(