I wanted to point out for those of you who haven't seen yet, there is an art contest that will focus quite a bit on pixel art called Liberated Pixel Cup, a contest to promote the creation of free games. The art half will start on June 1st and run until the 30th. The art that you enter will be usable by anyone who gives credit (or more accurately, be licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 and GPLv3). I know that will bother some people, so I thought I'd point that out right away. There will be three different prizes for the art, the exact monetary amounts will depend on how successful the donation phase is.
The purpose of the art phase is to create artwork that can be used to make entire games with a unified art style. There is a fair amount of free artwork available on the internet, but if you try to make a full game from it the art will be mismatched. The people running the contest are a little tired of "programmer art" so they've invested a good deal of their own money into starting this contest.
Just before the contest starts the base art and a set of guidelines will be released. The base art works best for an RPG, but any game style is encouraged as long as it expands on the original art. Other mediums are accepted as well, as long as it looks good with the pixel stuff. It's hard to pull off though, so they'd prefer pixel art.
If you're interested or curious you can check out
http://lpc.opengameart.org/ for more information and mockups using the current base art. Please note that the art is still in the works so it won't be exactly the same when the contest starts.
EDIT: Thanks for merging this post with the other one! I hadn't realized there was another one already when I posted this.
