Alright; thanks for your advice =) I appreciate it!

Sadly, this may be a situation where moving on is best and just keep these things in mind in future pieces :(

DeviantArt is more lenient with pixelart and hybrid pixelart is allowed so you can always showcase them there or on your own site.

Your scenes and art is lovely to look at and with these pieces in question is just technical issues that exclude them. I don't think its worth it or fun for you to recreate your own work.

 All right; I understand that then.
Unfortunately now, it's done; so should I manually retouch everything instead?

I did manually retouch the sky completely and removed the gradient initially. I can keep those rules in mind for the future but I am not sure now how to get the other pictures accepted. 

I think you are missing the whole point here. We don't want you reducing art to be some magical number. Your art can be created using as many colors as needed to create the image but keeping an eye on this so it doesn't get out of hand. This is a pixelart priciple of sorts. Its all about precision and control.

If you auto reduce then the piece will no longer be pixelart at all since your software chose the colors and pixels and not you. No use of any tool except the pencil (100% opaque) and the bucket tool to fill large areas (100% opaque).

When we were posting before we just assumed you were manually removing and editing and didn't realize you were forcing a color output file. Doing this will get you flamed and most PJ members will hate/ignore/report you and your art.

Please note that 'hybrid' pixelart does have its place and sometimes its called for. The pixeljoint gallery however is about pure pixelling with no FX or CG anything.

 Is says it has 249 :P How low does it need to be? 

 Alright thats fine =) Ya I was told before that I had over 1000 colors LOL so I put it down to 256 or something like that but I can reduce it once more =)

I understand no worries, thanks

Oh, I thought you hadn't as it still has over 250 colors :/

Use this HERE to verify pixelarts and get detailed color info in the future. Maybe bookmatk it :)

To use it click on any submitted art to get the image URL then paste it into that PJ utility.

We hope you understand we are all helping with the technical side of pixelart only and not coming down on you or anything like that, k.

 I did correct it; I got rid of the partial transparencies and removed the gradient effect that I had used, I also fixed the sky so that it was no longer sketchy; it's the same sky as used in "Crooked House" with just different colors. I will resubmit it though =)

Unsure if you've corrected or not so we're sending back. When ready just 'edit details' on this page and press the reubmit button at the bottom of the page, thx.

 Generally thats why I am using the different modes for, I did use different modes a fair amount on the igloo to get the shadow and light working the way I want, but generally thats it =). 

Thank you so much for the explanation! I've made some adjustments to the piece and I'm going to check the color count and such on here to see if it's working ok =). I reduced the others that mentioned as well lol.

The short answer is yes for levels below 100% opacity on a transparent background, sometimes for when they're not on a transparent background, and also sometimes when using blending modes in photoshop. When I talk about partial transparency I nearly always mean the first one though. As far as I know it's only the first of those, also called alpha transparency, that's not allowed here.

Here's a quickly made, and maybe not the best, example of partial transparency- link

It's hard to type "partially transparent" a ton of times so I'll just call it PT.

Basically there's 4 backgrounds (blue, yellow, green, and full transparency) with the same 5 color bar on top of each. The first two colors are PT on their layers, and so end up being a different color on each background while the last three colors are the same no matter what background they're on. When I talk about PT though I usually just mean the bottom example because in the final product, when all layers are flattened, those bottom pixels that are PT and on a transparent background will remain PT. The other ones above that become opaque colors when flattened, even if they were made using PT.

Now some pixel artists would say the top examples of PT shouldn't be done just because doing that does add extra colors to the palette in such a way that it reduces the artist's control over the pixels and increases the role that the computer plays in choosing colors for you. Technically I only used 9 colors here, counting full transparency, but because of PT pixels on different backgrounds the actual final color count is 15. Personally I would only use PT pixels and blending modes during color adjustment, in most cases.

Sorry that's really long winded, I probably should have just left it as the short answer at the start. x_x

Oh and also I don't think png-8 (what I use) supports partial transparency, but png-24 does. I think the only time you'd need png-24 is when you have more than 256 colors (the most that png-8 can have), so saving as png-8 or gif should automatically make solid any pixel that's PT. Not the best way of avoiding having PT, but it's a sure way.

 Ya I just read another comment about the sky stuff, so I'll try to adjust that to make it less scribbly; I did it that way because I found the blocked in colors too solid for sky, but I can reign it back to something less problematic lol. And for the gradient it's thankfully very easily removed lol.

By partial transparency do you mean just levels that are below 100% opacity? Or would that also include levels that may be set to different settings other than "Normal"?

Visually it's a very nice piece. I like the color choices a lot and it's a cool set up. I actually do like this. I have to say though that on this site we're pretty strict about not using NPA (non pixel art) tools like gradients. Here you're up to 1092 total colors. 251 of which are partially transparent. I think they're either all or mostly at the top edge and the bottom left and right corners. We have a thing against using partial transparency here, not because there aren't or can't be good uses of it, but I think because it's too easy to misuse it and it's basically a door that the mods here just don't want to open by allowing any gallery submissions with partial transparency. It can also cause the color count to rise very quickly without artist having good control over their colors. The sky background seems much more like oekaki than pixel art though because of the scribbling effect. We also consider oekaki to be NPA because it's done quickly while zoomed out instead of purposefully hand placing pixels while zoomed in.