You have some great work here I've moved the topic to Portfolios so potential employers can find you more easily.

Moved to the “Portfolios” section.

I think the third one is nice, because the purple helps add interest while tying the red and blue together, and it helps the visibility of the first and fifth characters’ silhouettes (on the far left and right).

This is difficult, but definitely possible by breaking it down into manageable steps.

Start with the gesture of the pose (easier to figure out with pencil and paper). Don’t get too cerebral at this point because you aren’t trying to make an accurate drawing, you’re trying to capture the energy/life of the body. Get a feeling of where the weight is centered, any twists in the body, long lines of action, or places where the body crosses over and obscures itself. Use simple shapes and don’t be afraid to get scribbly. Don’t be afraid to alter the gesture if you’re referencing a photo. Study the silhouette.

Once you figure out a gesture that you like, start to construct the simple forms/volumes of your subject. By simple volumes, I mean spheres, cylinders, boxes, cones, and the like. For example, a head might be a sphere (with a jaw at the bottom), an arm or leg might be a cylinder, hips or ribcage might be boxes. At this stage, be sure to think about the direction things are facing in space. Is the thigh facing towards or away from us? Is it facing left or right? Up or down? Human-like bodies are very complex, but if you break them into pieces based on basic shapes/volumes: the head, neck, ribcage, midsection, pelvis, upper arms, lower arms, hands, upper legs, lower legs, and feet; it becomes more manageable.

Finally, you can add color and detail on top of your established structure. With small pixel art, less is often more, so you want to look for main establishing features. What features define the look of your subject? Which features could you imply, or live without?

Sorry for the somewhat long and potentially overwhelming process, but it can be used to draw literally anything you want once you get the hang of it. If anything is unclear let me know and I can try to explain better, since I’m unable to draw some examples at the moment.

Welcome! Glad you decided to join us, I was a lurker for a long time too.

In my experience, pixel art is a niche skill in relatively high demand for indie games and Let’s Players. Sometimes higher profile clients (ex. Adult Swim) hire for TV or music videos. The job board on here is active, usually with new offers every 1-3 days, and the community on Twitter is active and decently sized. You should post your portfolio and/or contact some of those prospective clients.

In terms of ease in making basic income, I’d say it depends on your cost of living. Freelancers must charge more hourly than employees because they don’t get benefits and taxes are higher (at least in the US). If you live in a place with high rent like NY or LA, you’ll probably have trouble unless you’re at the “top of the food chain”. I think people at this level tend to have other art/animation gigs or work in other fields concurrently, both to sustain themselves and because pixel art isn’t their main skill, just another medium they dabble in (while I don’t consider myself a top pixel artist, I am fairly experienced, and this is the case for me).

However, if you live in an area where cost of living is low, then it’s possible to sustain yourself just through commissions/contract work, Patreon, and/or asset sales (Itch.io store). You don’t have to be the most amazing pixel artist ever for this, you just need to be decent at asset creation (could be tilesets, animation, set pieces, character art, etc.). People tend to hire artists with nice-looking colors, nice sense of clusters, and good readability (you can easily tell what the artwork is depicting from a distance). There tend to be a lot of games in need for foliage, buildings, character animations, character portraits, tilesets for various biomes, weapons, inventory items, icons, vehicles, and the like, so if you are particularly good at some or all of these things, you have a good chance of finding work.

EDIT: There’s also a market for pixel art that’s not for games, but rather for icons on social media or just for fun, if you just want to take small commissions for a bit of disposable income or financial padding.