After spending quite some time tweaking the above muscle study of Bruce I finally feel comfortable making my first WIP post. The pose itself is taken from Bruce Lee, the body itself is free drawn (as Bruce Lee doesn't have too interesting a muscle tone).

I'll take any anatomy pointers, but what I'm primarily struggling with is colouring this piece. When I start with colourizing the surfaces and add some basic highlight and shadows the piece becomes ultimately very boring, mainly because of the relatively large same-coloured surfaces. I do intend to add some sort of aura in the end to spice up the picture, but I want to get the basics done properly first. Can anyone point me to tutorials or samples of large surface pixelling?

i agree with him.

Large surface coloring is just like small surface pixelling. We can't give you pointers unless you try something first.

Also, this is pretty big for pixel art. Try resizing it to at least a 1/3 of what it is now, if you wanna save a headache.