That's wild.  I love the textures in the bridge.  Beautiful stuff.

 Thanks, but I've already read through his tutorial a few times and refer back to it constantly.  There's a specific style I'm using in line with it being a game, and trying to get stuff as simple as possible. I'm trying to avoid anti-aliasing as much as possible.  I've also worked exclusively in photoshop with pencil tool on 1 pixel diameter, and using rectangular marquee, it's a little tedious and time consuming, but I'm comfortable in ps. I do understand some of where you're coming from.  

The rocks are a little haphazard, but I've used a lot of reference from other video games and they seem fairly consistent with that I've looked at.  The sand is also only two colours.  Everything else in the picture is maybe 2 two three colours, disregarding the sprite.  It needs some work for sure, everything I've learned since making this peice has made me really want to re-evaluate this and add some more design aspects to the piece.  I'm actually quite happy with the background, but I do need to go in and fix some jaggies and add some dithering, but I'm satisfied with the way it looks.  I'm sorry if it doesn't conform to your idea of what pixel art should be, but to each their own.  Thanks for the commnets.

 Really appreciate all the feedback.  It's really encouraging me, and as a result I've been putting the pen to the paper a lot today! Hopefully some more stuff coming up.

@ SolarLune

Thanks for the feedback, I see what you mean with the water.  The rocks are kind of like that because I'm just assuming they won't show up on screen as the focus will be higher : P  And I'll experiment with the sand a little, but it's actually supposed to feel kind of like a sand duney sort of beach, the only one on an island rimmed with mountains and rocky fjords.  The mountains are just to kind of give a hint towards future levels and sense of what the rest of the island is like.  Thanks for the comments!

 Thanks <3 more to come!