The talk of bitsy's limitations reminds me of the tools where I learned super-small scall (and sometimes monochrome) pixel art... the Etch-a-Sketch animator.
Brilliant piece of tech for the day: a Gameboy-ish screen (but with FAT pixels, 40x30) and a digitized, screechy version of the traditional etch-a-sketch dials (heh, shake to erase was still a decade or two out for digital stuff), and 12 screens that could be played back in sequences of over 100 frames
I reproduced the examples in the booklet here: https://kirk.is/features/etcha/ and this is another art-minded thing I did: https://kirk.is/2002/04/15/ (I'm kind of intrigued with "photorealistic" stuff on super primitive display systems)
It also reminds of Pixeltime, word.com (before it was just a dictionary site) had an odd little 45x45 paint program with a digital judge/emcee and a bunch of competitions: https://kirk.is/pixeltime/
The biggest connection was me making tiny tiny fonts, 3x4 and what not.
Anyway, anyone here use either of those?