The key to good pixel art is that you have to use differences in shading to suggest more detail than you can actually display.
You can't draw scale mail, but the correctly chosen pattern of alternating gray pixels can *suggest* scale mail.
If you have any artistic talent you can probably do this freehand, and skip this section.
If you can't draw, I'm going to go over the trial and error you can do in GIMP to get passable pixel art by shrinking down, rotating etc. the images of actual objects. A good artist is going to get better results working freehand, and if you can use an existing pixel drawing as a "chassis", you are probably better off doing so. It is very much a trial-and-error procedure; GIMP has a lot of features you can try to make the image look good, and it's difficult to say what will work well when shrunk down a great deal.
The images below show how I made my "male bugrom" chassis. Once I have the chassis made, the modification of an existing chassis section is more relevant.
These are some test images to make sure that my hosting setup works. I'll add more explanation later.
Here's some beetle I grabbed off the internet -
And through a series of shrinkages, rotations, color masks, copying and pasting, I produced this chassis. I can say with confidence that no artistic ability was required
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