Color Design and Background Art

I am terrible at mixing colors. To create some kind of harmony in my work I usually choose a limited palette, from which I pick all the colors from. This time, to mask my incompetence as an artistic choice, I resolved to do all the backgrounds with just 8 colors (+ black and white) Here are some of them:

I started by drwaing everything by hand, but I quicly realized that it would be too time consuming (and painful with my crappy mouse) to do so. Instead I found some public domain photographs for myself and heavily edited and pixellated them. All of the characters will be hand drawn by me. They are the center of this product so they deserve more effort put into them.