During your pixelart learning process, what has been your best discovery?

I find myself in a constant search for ways to improve my workflow. It would be interesting to read your favorite discoveries, it could be some tool, drawing technique or a useful trick that marked your way of approaching pixelart and improving your flow.
Something that has helped me a lot is an option that Aseprite has to adjust the hue and saturation with a preview, it allows me to find the best color applied in the context anytime I want very quickly and focus my atention on other things. Helps me because I used to take a long time looking for the best color and ended up changing it right away. Now I change it all the time efficiently.

Not directly toolset/workflow related but learning how to make my own palettes made everything so much easier. I had always thought if i was to use my own colors i'd pick new colors for every single drawing, so i held off on it for awhile since it was easier to just use palettes from other artists- after the epiphany of realizing i could just make 16 or 32 color palettes and use them whenever i was lazy, or didn't feel like picking new colors it got so much easier to fully transition to using solely my own colors.

There's so many things it's hard to pick just one. But one of the biggest "aha" moments, that pretty much instantly improved my sprite animations by a great amount, was discovering the concept of sub-pixel animation. In pixel art, you basically only have whole pixels to work with, and when you're working at a small size, a one-pixel movement can be pretty substantial. But by using in-between colors to simulate movements of less than a pixel, you can do more subtle movements and make the in-between frames a lot smoother. Kind of like anti-aliasing over time, if that makes any sense. It really felt like an epiphany when I figured it out.