Thank's for the replies. This is what I did so far. I'm building a small animation toolkit for myself. I purchased Pro Motion and Graphics Gale. I decided that for pixel art, it's an excellent and affordable investment. A little premature, since I'm a beginner, but I would like a decent set of tools. I'm going to use gimp to scan and fade line art. I basically just set the brightness to a level where the lineart is a faded light gray color and it's simple to pixel over on a separate layer, or just a separate color depending on the program. It's an instant cleanup effect. I also, tried Grafx2. I absolutely love it, plus it's free. The only thing annoying is that the palette affects the gui. Even if the software is strictly pixel art, let's face it - we are using modern computers, so there is plenty of room for the image palette to be separate from the program palette. I found out also in another thread, that the latest 2.4 tests of Grafx2 are implementing single layer animation. So this sounds really promising and I hope to try it out soon.

I'm also building up a link list of tutorials and pixel art info. I'm interested in all blogs so please post links if possible and I'll check them out. Personally I don't have the skills to write tutorials and I won't be blogging, but I might put together a resource website myself with an artist link list; maybe.

I'm very interested in any examples of start to finish.

This is turning into a wishlist thread - lol.

If you can recommend good online video tuts or progress videos, please post. The only thing I try to avoid is videos with timelapses and loud music.

//PPD: merged your posts
PixelPiledriver - I'm on your blog now. Do you have a gallery?