So if this looks a bit odd you really need to understand my parameters for this. It was produced as an example of a piece for a challenge exercise I'm incorporating as an exercise in my series of ground-up "Learning Pixel Art" tutorials I'll be hosting on my blog. Attached to the second lesson, featuring Clusters. At this point in the lessons there has been no coverage of techniques like anti-aliasing, dithering, or any of the like, just pure cluster work.

Here's how the challenge works:

~ Close your eyes and think of the word "Landscape." Whatever image comes attached to that word in your head, that's what you're going to pixel. For me, it's a set of mountains and clouds lit from behind by a rising sun.

~  Open a new 100x100 canvas.

~  You have an unlimited color count, though I personally chose to try to keep it under 10 (and wound up only needing 5)

~ Every single cluster, no matter its purpose, must be at least 10 pixels large (if you add up how many pixels make up a cluster it must equal 10 or more). This means you can't taper points, you can't anti-alias, and there's a minimum size on details.

There's a focus on smooth curves and thinking in clusters and not individual pixels that will hopefully shape how the people reading the lesson will approach their pixel art as they continue. I think it's a super-interesting challenge and I'm pretty happy with my result, especially for just an hour to an hour and a half of work.

If you're interested in this series of lessons, titled Learning Pixel Art, it will be going live pretty much as soon as I write the whole thing over on my blog at logbook-project.com. I'll probably post in the chatterbox on the front page when it goes up if you don't want to check regularly. Seeya later!

EDIT: Decided to clean up the background thanks to Daruda, new version is up. Old version is here: LINK. Old version had 31 clusters, this one's down to 24.