I work in Photoshop nowadays, even though it's in some ways inferior to Deluxe Paint. I also did a bit of programming and released a handful of tiny games and silly things into the local geek community (I didn't really know what a BBS was back then). I remember trying to use '3rd Day', a program which would analyze the residual RAM contents after a reboot, but it was difficulty to get results. Ripping reference graphics from games was a hassle. Trying to see what games were doing with the pixels and frames while playing a game was hard. I spent a lot of time working on projects in Deluxe Paint, mostly experimenting with my own techniques because no one else around me was doing pixel art. Before this, I had actually drawn tiles from games like Megaman on cardboard and built my own levels, but working with pixels inside of a computer gave me a much stronger feeling of being privy with the game world realm. The first thing I pixeled was probably a hammer from the Super Mario Bros manual (which for some reason had line art pixel drawings in it). I knew about pixels since the C64 days, but never access to any kind of editor which allowed me to see what was going on behind the distortions of the TV shadow mask, scanlines, phosphor glow and RF-modulator signal compression (distortion). I don't think I quite understood the nature of pixels until I got ahold of Deluxe Paint in the late 80's.

Nowadays I would not attempt to pixel something this big - I'd just paint it instead.

It's less an attempt at pixel art and more an attempt at 'awesome picture' (demo scene style). It was done in Deluxe Paint III sometime in the late 80's or early 90's (note dragon-mullet). 'GHERKING' was found lurking on one of my old Amiga floppy disks.

Sand tile pixel art