Even outside of pixel art communities, it's generally agreed that limitations inspire creativity in ways that total freedom does not. Pixel art has limitations built in by design of the medium, so I feel that draws a lot of people in. It's also a great way to learn how to imply details in few strokes, seeing as the resolution limits us - pixel artists that are able to evoke rich texture and fluid movement in the low resolution we have are quite impressive.

It's also a very fluid in the sense where it's easy to iterate, where you can always edit it exactly how you want to - you can always retroactively edit a stroke and it'll look OK. There are cases in illustration where if a stroke doesn't look right, you'll have to redo the whole stroke instead of just being able to fix a pixel here or there.

The colors on this pumpkin are really something nice, it's super crisp. Great work!

Paint is nice and straightforward - it's a very direct way to just have you and the art with minimal distractions. For animating, I use aseprite, because it's honestly the best animation tool I've seen for pixel art due to how straightforward its design is.

For color correction, I occasionally put my pieces through GIMP before returning it to MSPaint.