this is very enjoyable

 the "preview overlay" is something I already had made, I just changed it to the desert pallet and layed it over the finished piece. The perview took 2 minutes at the most. I usually only get half a day to work on these challenges so there is only so much "juice"

 Its true I ran short on time when I was working on the lower half. 

 NIce use of the evil acid green. the animation it this looks like it took a long time. I really like the oars on the side. this will get one of my votes 

I like this, you fit a fair amount of detail into a relatively small piece. 

 P.S- the transparency makes it 13 colors (http://hivemind.in/pj/specs/index.php?urls=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pixeljoint.com%2Fpixelart%2F79039.htm)

 I didnt even think of it as a phoenix tree untill you guys said something, I just knew I wanted an animation that could loop back to the start. At firts I wanted to include as many elements as I could (ice/water/earth... and such) then I remembered the color limit. Someday if I have time I would like to do an "upgraded" version of this tree.

 Thank you very much friend. 

this looks pretty cool. I'll be keeping an eye out for this game.

 thanks for the comments. 

@ Felix- for awhile I didnt think it was going to work out. It ended up being a pretty fun piece to work on.

 thank you. The giant head and hand are some of my favorite mutants so far.

muppet knights...

 I really like your use of colors on this.

 I'm still pretty proud of this animation, especially the helmet. I made this sprite when I first started getting back into pixel art, his body was only suposed to be temporary, but I just ended up using that body for all the animations and never went back to "finish" it. 

 thanks for the comments. I was going for the chain smoking look. 

 The monster is the worst part about this piece. I was trying to make sure the whole thing looked round enough, that could be what helped give it the pillow look. I really want to be able to use dithering right, but I think I'll be avoiding it in any small pieces for a while. Looking at this even now makes me want to redo so much of the monster, Also I didnt like how the trees at the top turned out, but I'm not sure what I could have done to make them better. 

 yeah I had read somewhere that dithering can be hard to master and is rarely used right. I have a smaller version of this sprite (32x32) that will be used "in game", This was mostly just practice. I can understand why its better to try to avoid dithering. being consistant in an animation is hard enough with out trying to keep track of all those patterns as they move.