I was inspired while watching a documentary of egyptian art when it presented this piece on the show:
http://www.ulianka.com/images/historymural/muralhistory%20ancient%20egypt%20painting.jpg

I had never had much interest in egyptian art before but I found that particular piece to be so beautiful I considered at the time emulating it in my own way. Weeks later after looking up the images and revisiting them I finally decided to do it.

In the process of emulating the style I actually learned quite a bit about pixel art that I hadn't realized before, the main thing I learned is that very rigidly repeating patterns can look nice! I had always in pixel art leaned towards making tiles or repeating patterns try to seem less rigid and repeating but now I'm seeing that done properly it works just as well.

The hieroglyphs were the most time consuming part of this to make. I also had to strip away some parts of this image (and redo parts) to make sure it fits the guidelines of this website (there were gradients and filters originally), it ended up changing it quite a lot.

It was fun to do something like this, normally I don't so perhaps I'll try something like this in the future again.