Wow, I didn't think I'd get a new one torn this quickly. 

Yeah, this piece isn't all that great. In fact, it's really, really bad. The story behind this was that I had taken a few shots at pixel art before, but it kinda fell through when I kept using too many colors. So, when I decided to do this picture, I selected a few colors and decided to stick with them until the end. The violet was added at the end because when I tried using both the red and the blue in the background, it looked really bad. I do agree with you on the dithering. The problem was that, at the time, I had a hard time finding good dithering tutorials, so I just decided to alternate colors.

What I'm getting at was that this whole thing was really just experimental. Thank you for all of your help, I'll certainly keep your suggestions in mind when I am drawing pixel art in the future. I don't quite think I have enough sanity left to fix this one at the moment, though.

By the way, I should have added in my description that I was most certainly not going for realism. I'm no where near talented enough to do something like that yet! Your edit looks incredible.

 I think (and this is just a guess here) that you're supposed to tilt your monitor back a bit before you look at it. I'm looking at it on a laptop, and when you tilt it back it looks really nice. I'm not really sure if that was the intention, but yeah, when you look at it dead on, the black looks bad.

Nice job anyway!

Wow, this alternate ending to Spelunky is really morbid!

(Just kidding of course.) Great job, man.