I guess I don't know what pixel art is. I thought we all draw with pixels..

pixel art is less about what you draw with and more about how you draw. There should be complete control down to the level of a single pixel. Tools that don't give that control aren't used. Something like a gradient tool, blur and smudge tools, or even automatic anti-aliasing aren't used because the computer calculates and generates additional colors and adds them without the artist's consent. As a result the artist only has control down to a level that stops short of pixel level. Instead, a pixel artist specifically chooses every individual color that will be in the image and manually places each and every one. Not necessarily one pixel at a time though, because there's nothing wrong with a fill tool or a shape like a rectangle tool, but still no pixel changes color without the artist choosing for it to. Usually pixel art has an extremely limited number of colors, maybe between 2-30, as opposed to the thousands if not millions of colors that may be present in other digital artworks and photos. This is mostly because it's hard to control larger numbers of colors, but sometimes because it (mostly in the past I think) was meant to be used on various older game systems that had very low limits on how many colors could be displayed at once. Pixel art is also usually small scale because it's extremely time consuming to click pixels one by one while zoomed in super close. Really good pixel art tends to be very clean and crisp, and often more detailed than you'd see in non-pixel art.

Here's some examples of the good ones-
anything from this person
also his
also his
also his
someone else
this only has 12 colors
a lot of pixel art tends to be animated

most things in the hall of fame

cripes those must have taken years done as you described! damn

again, awesome work, and thanks for sharing. :)

Is it any fun?

Kind of, slightly, but not using shi painter. It's pretty hard to stay motivated doing so much for so little result. It'd be a little easier in photoshop because of better layer controls, such as lock transparency. I doubt I'll do any more here after I finish the current one. Lascaux doesn't work in such a way for pixel art to even be possible with it.