I've been rereading this. It needs a *lot* of cleanup. I hope people can get through the strange writing style and the hanging metaphors and stuff to the meat of things. What I wanted to get to is that I was discussing with my friend who doesn't know much about pixels about what I've tried to contribute to the form and the two things I sketched out in paper for her to understand where about perfect lines and how to clean up cluster contours, and about banding avoidance. She got both very easily. These two things would be first and most important lessons I would teach a pixel newcomer. I think every pixel artist that wants to progress should take small photos of things and try to abstract them first in 1bit and then in 2bit to 1. learn how to make good lines and 2. learn how to make lines touch without too much banding. This knowledge can be systemized. If I weren't working two jobs, I would create a small curriculum and keep a repository of how people 'solved' the same set of images. Perhaps someone else wants to step up. Something like a high contrast human face to be abstracted in 16x16, a telephone, a car, a baseball, stuff like that, simple and iconic and useful. Not an oil painting.