I tried doing this a few months ago but didnt have much luck.
Is your method basically to drastically reduce the size of the pic (by like 200%) and then blow it back up again? Thats what I was doing but it looked kinda cheap. Yours are nice breh
I go for 100x100 px but try messing with something like 40-50 if you want less detail. You have to hand draw every pixel back on top of the canvas no matter what anyway.