Well here goes
This is my entry for the pixel art weekly challenge by 
This was an interesting one for me because I don't usually do art, but I enjoy 8bit games so I thought I'd give it a shot. It took me about 3 days to make, working mostly in the mornings and evenings.
At first I had no idea what I wanted to do for the challenge. The general idea was to animate a cow walking from side to side and it's tail whipping about, but that was way too difficult for me to attempt so early on. I am still learning and this piece alone took me quite a while to complete. In time I'm sure I'll be able to produce better content faster.
I started only with a rough draft of the head, then moved on to the body and then the legs. The legs were quite a pain, I just couldn't get the shape right.
It finally started looking like something:
After the majority of the body was done, I moved on to the shading. Shading adds quite a lot to the overall "aliveness" of the picture.
I got this idea to create this sunset gradient with a black silhouette of a ranch fence in the distance. After that I tried blending the colors together to make the overall image flow better and to create a contrast between the cow and the background.
Once that was all done I went on to animate the cows eyes, the stars, the cloud and the mini pond.
Overall I am very happy with the whole gif, even though I went the "cute" route which I'm not usually drawn to. This is way more than I thought I could do! I learned so much from this piece and I'm looking forward to applying some of the techniques on my next pixel art. I'm looking forward to doing something game related in the future.