Helm,
  You seem to have a beef with the demo scene in general and it was those derogatory comments that lead me to write an essay of a post in reply.  I've already stated that I don't have the source photo from this, it was from a magazine at an old work place and has probably now been decomposing happily on a compost heap somewhere in Japan for five years, or has been recycled to make 'Hello Kitty' stationary.
  Please, by all means crit the hell out of my work. Also note that, of the pictures I've submitted so far, only two used photo references. The rest are original works, some inspired by the style of other artists but none copied from their work. I do not pass of the artistic work of others as my own.
  For the Hawaiian picture, I again used photo references for the girl but the rest is from my own head (I'm good at clouds :) I can also draw fairly realistic looking people without the need of reference but I only got to that level by copying from life!
  If you want non skill-builder pieces then just look at my gallery. I challenge you to find the 'originals' of those. Actually, you won't have to look far as they are the originals.

Hi guys,
  I wasn't really expecting all the controversy- I'll try and use less colours with any new pics I post here, not  because I'm trying to save on disk space (although I have done things in fewer colours for that same reason) but because it's less likely to boil blood.
  I often use more closely packed colours in the brighter ranges as the eye is more sensitive to changes of intensity in bright colours than dark ones, which is why I can get away with those large areas of stippled colour in the rocks on the left. It's the same reasoning behind gamma correction - that packs more colour detail for bright shades and less for dark ones to avoid banding and as a kind of colour space lossy compression.
  The kind of blurred effect is fairly easy, if a bit laborious, to achieve using standard tools. Just set up your ramped palette in dpaint, get the fingers over the '[' and ']' keys for cycling the colours and get to work with progressively smaller brushes.  Then go back and tidy, adding stippling where needed.  Anti-aliasing by hand is one of those skills that is now almost totally redundant in professional CG but which took me an age to get right. I can now anti-alias as well as the best rotated grid, edge enhancing 128 sample AA routine but not as quickly.  The AA in this image was all done by hand.
  One of these days, when I've finished my other programming projects and probably in my advanced dotage, I'll write a bloody dpaint clone that does record every pixel you drew and can save the results out to an animation. 
  Also, where on this site is the FAQ that defines exactly what is considered 'pixel art' these days?

Helm:
  Yes, I can see the difference but you're probably right, I could have used less colours. I could also have decided to do it in photoshop, ega mode, as a 3D model or not to do it at all. However, I did it as I did it and I'm afraid those are the breaks.  Please feel free to remove duplicate colours if you like.  Whilst this was indeed a technical piece, using a photo for reference, I can, infact, draw freehand as well!

Haash:
  Crap, don't say that! I sometimes feel that way when I see what I consider to be awesome work and sometimes it inspires me to improve my own work, depending on what side of the bed I got out of.  This image was the culmination of around 15 years experience in pushing pixels and also, probably more importantly, results from actually having the time to create it. It took a week working 9-5 whilst I was criminally underemployed at a web design department - they really should have found something useful for me to do.

Hi,
  Wow, thanks for the nice comments. I made sure when I did this one that I had the history and I've got it on an old machine at home. I'll dig it up and post it here. What's the best way to post image histories given that the rules state that they don't like users posting partially finished work? If on the boards, which thread's the best?
  As for the amount of colours, I know it's pushing the boundaries of what has become considered pixel art. I appreciate that there are aesthetics in this medium that favour as small a palette as possible: I spent my teens honing my skills on 16 and 32 colour machines (Atari ST and Amiga).
  With this image, I wanted to push myself a bit further than I'd previously done and wanted to capture the subtle hues of the source image using 8bit colour, rather than aiming to go for as absolutely few colours as possible.  It was kind of my DPaint swan song and although it probably lacks artistic merit as I used a photo for reference (which, unfortunately, I no longer have), I did put my heart into it.   It's the best pixel pushing image I've ever made.

  I've got a bunch of stuff at home that's more unambiguously pixel art and I hope you guys enjoy them.