I'm surprised the author criticised their artistic ability so much. I found the art style quite endearing and seeing the different graphic styles to emulate different systems was impressive.
I'm a little bit better now, but I guess it looks different when you see the end result. Believe me when I tell you the process was quite painful and it involved starting over several times :)
Out of curiosity, what tools do you use to make the artwork for your games? Anything outside of the standard linux image applications (gimp, inkscape) ? I've always been curious about making my own game, but when I sit down to work on the art assets, I end up getting very frustrated and tend to put those projects aside.
I use Gimp mostly, once I learnt how to tweak it for pixel art it is quite good.
For me all starts with the right palette. It really helps to get what you're looking for. I usually work with 64 colors (unless there's any special restriction, of course).
For me it really helped to configure Gimp for pixel art: set the pen to 1 pixel, save some palettes, set the grid to 8x8 when doing Spectrum graphics, a keyboard shortcut to show/hide the grid, etc. Gimp defaults are not good for pixel art.
Other than that, jut zoom as needed. I usually scale the games x3 when trying a retro style, but in Gimp I draw mostly at x8.
