looks pretty good. Heres an edit I did to adress a few points

basically I increased the contrast, such that the distinction between whats in the light and whats in the shadow becomes more imideatly obvious.  I also changed the palette to include hue shifting.  So here I started the lights towards yellow, and moved towards red-violet in the shadows.  I also got rid of the pure black outlines and replaced them with the darkest purple I had.  Also I noticed that you used a couple differnt colors in your outline, but this is not neccesary.  At 1x, each color still looks black, so theres only use in having a single color.  Even at 10x I cant really tell.

Also, even if you are going to use solid outlines, I think you should work to get rid of the outlines on the inside of the sprite.  In my edit I replaced the bottm half of the elipse on top of the log from a black outline to just AAing the light part into the dark.  In the little projections from the log you could make the top part of the outline lighter than the bottom so that it conforms with the light source.  Black outlines, when brought too much into the inside of the sprite tend to make things look a little more amaturish in my opinion.

Lastly I think a bit of reflected light on the left side of the log helps give it a sense of roundness.  I added it in pretty sloppily into my edit.

With this punching bag, I like the new version so well done, but if that's a symbol or writing on it it's hard to read and if it's scratches or cuts, I don't think the highlights should circle around it like that. In fact, the only reason they would for a symbol is because it's commonly a seperate piece of fabric.

Have a better look Chris, they are not exaclty the same.

About the punching bag: review the bottom part of the wooden stand (the diagonals). The lines on there which are supposed to be the wood texture are very unclean and make it look messy, while the rest of your pixel is nice and crispy even with the texture!

The same goes for the punching bag. Whatever you tried to put on it, clean it up!

Oh, and about perspective, I think the diagonal on the north side (behind) is much and much too high up in the air to reach the floor.
Good luck!

Alright, so i've gone back and tried to address some of the issues.

With the sprite of the meat, I've been trying to learning how to "ramp colours" and be bold with contrast and saturation choices. How did I go?

So, I'm still on the crusade to perfect my pixelling technique. I've started to create my main character for the game but something seems...missing/odd?

For the moment you can ignore the eyes. Something about him makes him look more like an NPC than a main character (maybe this question is for a different forum).

Also looking for same type of critique, colour, shading...anything.