I looooove pixel art and wanted to make some, but oh my! I think it is waaaay more difficult than regular vector graphics or just painting something nice. I have the feeling that every pixel counts and every pixel needs to sit perfectly.
Yeah, proper pixel art isn't as trivial to make as it might seem. Pedro Medeiros made like a bazillion free guides on specific techniques and objects, maybe check that out if you want to give it another shot: https://www.patreon.com/saint11 <3 <3 <3
What took me the most time was actually the animations. You can usually save time with selection and transformation tools to modify the moving parts between frames. With pixel art, you have to redraw those, pixel by pixel. And I used flat color, I gave up doing pretty pixel art with shadowing and tones XD