My method for art is usually the same; draw a big picture in the GIMP, then shrink it down to the correct size so that all the little flaws are diminished. Although sometimes I scan a penciled in image as a framework to draw on.

If I want something particulaly clean looking, I use Inkscape instead, and slowly manipulate the curves until it looks right.

This reminds me that I really should get back to working on my art skills!

Inkscape looks quite interesting, I might try it out. I usually use Paint, GIMP and more recently Paint.net. I've never been able to do very good pixel art and shrinking it down has the added advantage of adding anti-aliasing for you.

I have to try out Paint.net myself. Inkscape has the big advantage that because it's vector based you can shrink or grow the images to whatever size you like. I still usually convert to a raster format for actual use, but it's still handy to have the raw image in vector form while working on it. Plus it's really handy to be able to move vector points around while working on an image if you can't draw lines properly freehand (like me!).

Here's a link to a cartoon figure I made while teaching myself Inkscape if you want to see some end results: considering I'm no artist I think it came out rather well.

That's a pretty good drawing. Paint.net was made as a replacement for MSPaint but with more features like layers and good resizing etc.