I started mucking about with pixel art 2 days ago. Subsequently its been a sttep learning curve, seeing as I never got into it at a young age like lots of people who did Sega/Nintendo?/other console style pixel fanarts...(so many people used to do pixel art, its really surprising!)
There seem to be a few standard sizes for sprites, 2 being 16 pixel high and 32 pixel high...I'm making my characters in 50x50 pixel squares as that is the size of a Deviant Art avatar, and it seems to work well for a character with a shadow and a bit of background colour.
I'll post a link to my first pixel arts as soon as I get the whole cast of [CLM] finished - just 2 more to go! More info/meanderings soon, I'd better get back to the little squares now - so here's a good example of pixel art to leave with!