The colors and piece look awesome but it should really be at least 2x larger, this has potential!

In Edit 2 I finally saw that there is a pot, not a strange looking cat. But why not to make it obvious, as Manupix suggested - either by soilid color fill or by clear outline? 

Volcano in the background looked slightly better in edit 1.

Concentrate on how clear it all looks, if it could be read any other way, and if it could, change it till it becomes obvious. Without it all artistry and effects will go to the void.

BTW, the format of EDIT2 PNG is not suited for all browsers. Gif is preferred.

Oh, fine, your massive critique compels me to try to improve it!  No major rehauling though, sticking with black BG.  Also sticking with this palette because having an original palette wasn't my goal and these colors provide a huge challenge.

I mainly focused on the bg in this latest edit.  I want to know if I actually managed to convey anything with it yet.

Better. Not there yet.

I can now see the pot, the guy and hat, I just noticed the hand, I see the flowers, I still don't know what's in the bg.

I'd suggest to make the pot much more obvious, either by solid color or outline. Make sure the guy is more readable too, maybe by separating him more from other elements.

The rainbow curvature is not as smooth as could be, it looks more like bent than circular. Also the black pixels between red and yellow are probably useless.

The 3 colors are a rather obvious choice and about equal in saturation, you might try to make the palette a little more original.

If you feel like doing a major rehauling, you might try using blue as bg and use black for shadows of the fg elements. I'm not sure, worth testing.

You are right that this piece is awful, and I acknowledge that and I won't make excuses as to why it ended up so bad, but I enjoyed making it and I didn't do it for the sake of a ribbon (if I did stuff for the sake of ribbons, I'd have more than just one already).

protip: dont make stuff for the sake of doing it. i know its cool to get ribbons and stuff and to try to just dump content, but one single carefully planned and precise entry =/= an entire collection of 5am random doodles on mspaint.

this clearly suffers from readbility and its clear that you have no idea whatsoever as to what is going on there. as much as you forced it to a challenge restrictions, you actually ended creating a mashup of random pixels splattered on a black canvas with little to no sense.

This is what I get for throwing something together just before going to bed and after staying up for a very long time.

I needed a desperate change in avatar though, so...

Not very readable, but is to be expected from four colors.

View at x2 or x3 people...

Some nice hints of shapes, but VERY unreadable - all thrown in one place and colors don't help to differentiate part belonging to one object from part belonging to other.

Blue is too dark to stand out on BG, BTW.

 I don't really understand this xd.

Honestly, I have no idea what this is except there's a rainbow in it. :/