Once apon a time I decided that I wanted to make all the art for an RPG. I was quite young at the time and doing the typical young teen thing of trying to recreate the things I liked but I was also fully aware of just how very much work that would take. I figured that if I was really stubborn and just worked at it a little at a time I'd eventually get there. I firmly believed at that stage in life that all I really needed was to spend enough time polishing something and through sheer effort it would come out amazing. This meant that I believed that no effort was wasted which is totally true, but I also didn't take as much time planning things out as I should have and I spent a little too much time on things I should have abandoned. I spent a lot of time editing sprites, trying to create my own from scratch, and trying to figure out animation. As I worked my focused shifted from making this one game to getting good enough at pixel art to make it and then to just enjoying making pixel art. But the desire to make that RPG art stuck around.
Eventually I did get reasonably not awful and decided it was time to get to work on those RPG tiles. I studied every tile making tutorial I could find. I downloaded XP's RTP and stared at it for hours trying to figure out how it was done. I looked at rips and screencaps of beautiful pixel art from famous console games. Then I did something super smart and didn't look at any of those existing tiles and instead used real life references and started drawing tiles. I also hung out at a community of amazing and professional pixel artist and with a lot of really great feedback and some hard work managed to make this:
