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Thank you, and yes, I intend to do wolves of my own later. But this was intended to be a challenge to me, also, so I aimed for the reference, despite the photographic distortions.
Anyway, this was very enlightening. Thank you.
Oops! my mistake. Still the photo looks compressed to me and the wolf is in a very twisted shape.. was he chasing a snake? S
Using photographic references brings up several issues. One is that photography has its own way to see which is different from our eyes' in several respects, for instance perspective.
The wolf photograph was taken with a telephoto lens and thus has extreme perspective 'compression' (or shortening). The wolf looks misshapen in it. A wide angle lens would give the opposite effect. But we think of these images in our eyes' own terms. Our eyes never see telephoto or wide-angle shots, we interpret what we see in them as actually compressed or extended (other problem is we see a lot of photographs every day and have grown used to it, so that non-photographers might not notice but still make the assumption unconsciously).
When we draw from a picture, unless hyper-realistically detailing it, this information is gone, but the distortion remains. The drawing becomes one of a misshapen object. The anatomy may be correct and yet the picture is wrong (however your piece looks more correct than the photograph, because you changed the neck volume by cheating on the shading. That was very smart! In fact I didn't even notice the drawing was 'wrong' until I saw the photo).
Second (and more important) issue: a photograph is a frozen instant in time. That is not the way our senses see the world, our mind understands it and our memory reconstructs it. Our experiences are a construct of several points of view, moments and abstractions, even of the most humble objects and circumstances. Each of us has a mental image of a 'wolf' which is a synthesis of thousands of wolf-related experiences. No single ref picture can capture this, this is why any drawing from a single photograph will always look just that: a drawing from a photograph.
Since you you have all this wolf documentation and passion, you should work towards drawing your own wolf in which you would pour all of it.
Sorry, this was long ;)
A very awesome pixelling in any case!
Hey, no problem at all, showtime. Critiques are always useful if you mean no harm =)
And yeah, you're right. Maybe my eyes see the wolf ok because I'm used to the picture.
Hmmm, well sometimes proportions that look right in photographs don't look so good even when directly translated to drawing. I'm struggling to come up with useful critique, though, sorry... 
Thanks for sharing the reference, though!
Thank you all for the comments.
About the anatomy, I've been getting that a lot. But no, it is correct. My hard-drive is cramped with photographic references - I'm a wolf addict. My bad, forgot to mention I used a solid reference:
http://recolituslupuspack.webs.com/Steppe%20Wolf.jpg
This is a steppen wolf. It looks weird because he has his head very very lowered. I love this picture.
I agree with showtime here. The neck and upper back needs to be more to the left of the pic since in the refference you used for that part the wolf's entire body was frontal or even with the tail a bit to the right. everything else is just great.
Looks good, scrap that, Looks awesome! but the neck area is a bit too big i think.
Love the colors and good rough pixel work there. However, I agree with showtime about the anatomy. I hope you find more time for it soon!
I like the colours and attention to detail going on here, but the anatomy is bugging me. It looks to me like you use 2 different reference images for this wolf -- one for the head + neck area, and another for the hind quarters -- and combined them in such a way that the wolf looks somewhat hunchbacked. I could be totally wrong though, but regarless, something in the lower neck/upper back area looks off to me.
I tried to find a photo of a wolf in a similar position to see if their back is apt to hunch like that, but it didn't work out too well for me, oh well. : )
Cheers
I love it, every aspect is enjoyable, if I didn't know any better I would assume this wasn't even pixel art, great work!
Adorei o efeito no pelo, as cores ficaram otimas nele, ele tbm ficaria lindao com tons cinzas.
I love the colors and how they are mixed and fur, though bits seem out of place. Very impressive work!
I'm really in love with this :o