It's also from 3 years ago, if you note my little signature up above Leeloo's head.

The preview is a cropped piece of the pic...it's impossible to make the whole thing a preview, so I cropped it down to their faces. Also, as for it being blurry - well, Gimp was being stupid >v< 

Keep in mind that I don't use photoshop or Gimp to do the actual pixel work. I use MSPaint. To me, using fancier programs is cheating. If you're going create something, do it. Don't use nifty tools to do the work for you - like creating the folds in the clothes and then pour a pattern in to it. Draw the folds yourself and draw the pattern yourself. That's my philosphy. You don't have to agree with it.  

Also, There's alot more work done to them than you think. For one, I changed the skin tone on both, as well as the eyecolors, and the background was drawn completely by hand. I'm quite happy with how they came out. 

Rescaled preview won't do, try using a cropped part of the full piece for it. Also, I'm not sure about the whole dithered thing... a file format problem?

The bases are almost untouched and the parts you've added (bg, wings, clothes...) could use some more work :s