What you see online is the best pieces, not the sketches, not the unfinished frustrating stuff that never came out, so it’s hard to not feel insufficient or like an impostor. People might be talented, but mostly they put in a lot of time and work. Let yourself go one step at a time, enjoy the process, and you’ll surprise yourself eventually.
As in, look at stuff from games you like and made by other artists, and very intently try to figure out what works and what doesn’t, what makes it tick. If you wanna do card tricks, there’s not enough with being enthralled by the result, you gotta start wondering about the method and looking closer at the details. It will remove some of the magic, but it will add some new one.
Straight up copy pieces by artists you like, or use them as a base. As long as you do it respectfully and don’t claim to have not, it’s gonna be fine!
New artists are always worried about “finding their personal style”. Trust me, this is like brothers that are convinced they don’t look alike cause they just see their differences, while everyone else can feel they’ve grown up in the same house. Other people do see your style, and in a while youre gonna be having the opposite problem, so don’t worry about it. Your “style” will show up whether you want it or not.
Pixelart is all about making small intentional choices. Start in low resolutions and with 1px brush and a restricted palette (though sometimes people that come from illustration find it easier to approach it from the other side, so do whatever works for you). Question every pixel. You wanna be making as many decisions per second as you can. Zoom in and out constantly, try stuff. You’re gonna be kinda slow at first but you’ll get faster quickly!
One of the greatest advantages of pixelart in low res is how easy it is to move a bunch of pixels around, restructure, remake, change a color on the palette… stuff that would be very hard in other mediums. You’re not gonna get it right on the first take through sheer divine talent, so restart pieces, delete chunks, move them around, change the palette.
All art has “theory”, or a bunch of rules, recommendations and terminology that might feel constricting and technical. Pixelart has a lot of it. Take it as a bunch of shortcuts and handy rules to get decent results quickly that you should probably follow at the beginning and you can question and break later on.
Pixelartists often know each other and are usually pretty chill. Leaving nice comments, joining discord servers, participating in collabs will make it easier for you to feel like a pixel artist, learn from others, and have a good time pushing pixels around.
Do post (& repost) your work online and engage with other people’s work, but don’t get too obsessed with numbers. Care more aboout getting to know & getting known by other pixel artists than how many likes you get, for the algorithm is fickle and random and will drive you crazy, but the art you make and the people you meet are a lot more reliable.