I'm a noob on all levels here, so apologies upfront.
I've been developing a piece of art for a music project called "Through the Earth" and I've gone through several redesigns of the same idea. After reading a little about pixel art (the first page of Google results for "pixel art tutorial") I thought I'd give it a shot.


I sort of like the sky, land, and trunk, but I can't begin to figure out the leaves. It sort of looks like a barf tree. I'm considering scaling up the resolution to make creating small leave shapes easier and to give me the ability to write the name in better, but I'd lose to low-res feel to the land and trunk.

I'm posting it here for two reasons. One, you guys are good at helping with this kind of thing. Two, its the first time I've done pixel art, so I'm wondering how it went.

If it's okay, I'm posting the earlier artwork I did for this cover as a reference. Mostly, I'd like to recreate the text that I did for this in a pixel art style, but I haven't gotten past the leaves yet.
The only things I didn't create in this art are the tree and the sky background, both of which came from CGTextures.