Great work! Wow!

... but I think that the lion's arm is a bit thin... [link]

stunning

This piece has waay a to high "corrections":"praise" comment ratio...

So hereby I give you some
 

The lion looks surprised to me, which I find hilarious but not totally unfitting.

Very nice piece! I find the hold a bit wierd, it doesn't look like a strangle and my first thought was that the hand goes "into" the lions head (like with a puppet) but now I think his hand rests somewhere in his mane which makes the scene look more like a dancing pose gone wrong. Afaik you would use your underarm (or that gap between under- and upperarm) to strangle people in that position and I think same goes for lions. Of course assuming that it's a choke hold in the first place.

It may be to late to turn it into a choke hold but a great dance pose is still in it!

@Night: I'm definitely not the right guy to do edits, but it sounds like we're talkling about the same thing. Foreshortening, the position of the hips, the angle of the torso. The upper torso looks great, it's just doesn't look right in relation to the rest of the body, in my eyes. I also thought the lion's upper limbs were a bit short, but googling some lion skeletons, I was in the wrong. Given the angle of the light, I kind of agree with ADrawingMan in regards to the "dip" too.

I think the the happy / jolly look comes a lot from the eyes. It's hard for me to find a reference picture where a lion has wide eyes like that, in the middle of a struggle. That's why I linked to the gif in my last comment. I did look at the picture on my laptop though, and the mouth looks better on a brighter screen. But the eyes are still an issue for me. Anyway,I'll leave it at that. I'm out of my depth coming with this sort of detailed feedback.

The pixelling and palette are both super well done, but the lion looks a bit jolly to be strangled :P 

In regards to Hercules, imo the huge dip in the neck area doesn't look right, the palette really makes up for all of this though! 

Thanks for the criticism everybody! I'm always trying to learn from my mistakes.

@Agent00X
Thanks! C'mon though, I would better than to use a human's anatomy on a lion or any other animal for that matter (except for like apes I suppose, to an extent, mind you). I guess this has to do with my lack of study with animal anatomy (or, well, lion anatomy here).

@CELS
Can you show or explain what you mean by proportion issues?(I actually really want to know what you mean) The ones I know of are in the torso (the foreshortening kinda failed there with the pelvis being placed a bit wrong), and the lion's forearm.

About the strangling; yeah I have that problem with showing cause and effect along with expression (like conveying that someone is struggling  for example) in pictures, it doesn't help that I do it all from my mind too, but I really can't see what you mean by him looking happy; this surely has something to do with my monitor because the mouth doesn't connect  at all with the cheeck - it doesn't create a grin. Which leads me to believe that either my monitor displays things too brightly, or yours too dark.
Anyway, thanks!

@Jeremy
Thanks!
Ah, I understand what you mean right now. Just wanted to keep a cooler/colder feel to the stone. 

@Mr.Fahrenheit
Thanks! That's mainly what I aiming for.
 

Yeah I would agree that everything seems a bit overdefined, but its a good practice in anatomy.

greys tend to punch against saturated colours, especially in cases like this where that purple is quite a bit darker but very saturated

I didn't realise this was for the challenge til now, so kudos

It looks like there's a number of proportion issues for both Hercules and the lion, and it's basically impossible to strangle anyone like that, which makes it look like he's just hugging it. But the main issue is the expression of the lion, which looks very happy to me. Compare the expression of this lion to these lions. For all its shortcomings (in my eyes), this piece still has a lot of great stuff going on. The colours are amazing, btw

The lion`s arm`s muscles are wrong (theirs are not like humans`, see here), but it`s more of a nitpick, especially considering that we can never see cat`s muscles that clearly: in fact, they never (or almost never) protrude.

...forget it, that`s amazing

Thanks I appreciate the comments guys!
I agree on the lion's size Jeremy, I realised this halfway through so I didn't want to really bother. But, since it's mythological I can play quite a bit with their sizes and all - say, Hercules is bigger than the lion (obviously he would be larger than an average person, that's a given).
About the colours; I can't relate, it doesn't pop up to me (perhaps something to do with the monitor?). Wouldn't increasing the saturation just make it pop out more though?
edit*
Also, you have consider that it's used not only on the skin or fur/hair, but also on the rock. i think that if anything I should have made it more muted, as in, less saturated and more neutral.
 

nice work on heracles,but the lion should probably be at least twice the size. i think the grey-brown you've used pops too much as well – should maybe be darker &/or more saturated

Just epic. Some pixels could be polished a bit, or maybe the red palette used in the lion's tongue could be darker. 5/5 anyway.

This is more intense than the scene in the newest Hercules movie.