From your point of view, how much techniques and philosophies of "normal" drawings (made in programs like Sai 2 or Photoshop) can be applied to pixel art? specifically in programs like Aseprite or Piskel.
Most tutorials treat pixel art as separate from other art because of the low resolution. However, having a good eye for color, light and shadow is very important at the small scale of pixel art. You have such limited canvas size to express what you want to show.
It becomes a process of painting, but your strokes are 1x1 squares and each one is important.
What trips a lot of people up is that you have a lot of colors to blend at larger sizes, but to have a sharp picture that stands out at a small size you need to stick to limited colors.
And, of course there is a lot of stylization going on, but if you have good anatomy skills you get much clearer people.
What I'm rambling though is that if you already have skills with traditional art, you're going to have a step up when learning pixel art.
Some further reading:
- Saint11 - Covers a lot of color and animation that pixel art is known for.
- Raymond Schlitter - Texturing
- Adam Younis - Very basic painting pixel art tutorial.
- Brandon James Greer - Composition
- Brandon James Greer - Traditional Art to Pixel Art
- Brandon James Greer - Watercolor Pixel Art
- Dan Fessler - Cheating classical art into limited color pixel art