The mods give reasons when they reject pieces. If something's taking a long time, it means the people voting are all voting different ways, so there is no consensus. It would be nice if people would comment, but not everyone has the time, willpower, or language skills.

The owls look noisy and unfinished, they need more pixel-level care to get rid of the single-pixel noise and jaggies. The backgrounds have some noise issues. Overall, both feel like colour reductions of higher-colour images rather than hand-pixelled works, there's a lack of pixel-level polish all over.