I upscaled this and printed it as cards for all my friends after finishing it up as a last minute Valentine's Day card, even though most of them don't go through the trouble of doing that at all. :)

The lines I originally drew on graph paper as practice, though it was just the character standing in it and he wasn't holding anything, originally. I first made it into pixel art a few weeks ago, only ever getting to the lines though. I started coloring this in it at 1 AM on Valentine's Day morning, then spent a while on the heart and making it look like he's holding it, and I felt pretty satisfied with it. The text is a last minute thing I added which is just some simple 5x5 character design with rounded corners.

I keep feeling I could've done a much cleaner job with the shading, but I'm not entirely sure what would be a good way to go with when improving that, cause I keep making decisions and then doubting myself.

I haven't come up with a name for this character at all, yet. He's a dragon/lizard guy and I really need to start using these characters in some way, cause I feel like it could be pretty fun!

EDIT: I decided to change the brightness of the text since the darker color looks terrible with the dark baground, what with this being transparent. Still the same color count, though.