Yeah, I've done freehand pixel art for a card game I'm designing, but that's designed very much to be blocky and low-grade. Then for the game I'm working on I've done "pixel art" by making photomontages on the computer, messing with the colours a bit, then crunching them down to a couple hundred pixels across and indexing the colours to reduce the palette. Which works surprisingly well - not very well, but it's alright.