whoa! was not expecting this ....
Adarias - yeah, it is kind of dull, but I am not going to expect my first attempt to be completely oozing with original, creative energy. hopefully my second will. When I have beaten this to death, I really want to try something much more divergent.
Feron - it is not a rip at all. no copying took place. I studied similar images for about an hour when I first started, just to understand the methodologies of pixel art, not to recreate the original.The last 15 hours were without reference to shapes or forms. After that first hour, I just problem solved the entire tileset into working. Despite coloring similarities, the more I progress, the more my method develops and style hopefully emerges.
As I continue on more tiles, hopefully the similarities will start to give way to my own vision of a cliched RPG world.
yosh64 - Thank you for the support! Haha, those flowers still dont work do they. I spent a lot of time trying to get that to work. That was maybe my third tile though, so I should probably revisit now that I have a better idea what I am doing.
That is an interesting note about the grass on the cliffs. I was hoping that by altering that grass I could break up the monotony of the grass tile while really pointing to the fact the ledge is indeed coming to an end. I wonder how that could be solved, by instead of cutting that grass, adding a bit more brightness to the cliff's crest or maybe coming up with a shadow tile for the base of the cliff, or putting more contrast into the cliff face.
Others' points regarding the grass, I agree it is not defined on the tile itself, however I am interested in using supplementary tiles to fill in that knowledge for the viewer (note the existing long grass tiles pointing left and right). We'll see how that works.
The massive palette on the grass, I think will remain on this one (though I agree with the suggestions) allowing me to continue on to more tiles that should really help the piece "pop."