I honestly haven't done pixel art of this sort ever in my life. I have been doing classical art however so It's really just traditional art in low resolution. If you practice that, the concepts of color and light are the same, regardless. :D hope this helps.

Thanks. I'm looking for a better tool for scaling up the pixel art without it adding filtering / blurring like it is seen here. I really want that crisp look. Might try ffmpeg

EDIT:
yep, just reuploaded after using ffmpeg toolset. Finally no more compression.