A practice in muscles (and some coloring thrown in)

This one is a bit old. It's actually one of the sketches I submitted for my portfolio to the Digital Animation course.
Wanted to draw a muscly warrior, but ended up with a muscly softy. Later on he dances in the meadow and picks flowers. I always take a long time when drawing complex muscles like this, because every muscle group has to interact with the movement of him raising his arm and letting the butterfly land on his finger.
As you might guess, it would be a lot more difficult to re-draw every single one of his muscles for every frame, which is why I notice in superhero cartoons, like Batman or Superman, that the muscles are often "suggested" by use of strategic lines that says "this man is buff", without actually going into great details of the every muscle groups and rather draw biceps, chest and abs.

As you can also see, I took the time to really define his muscles to get the realistic impression of size and depth, to seperate each muscle and not just make him a big lump of mess. I would admit that this guy would not represent the average human male, but it's fun to play around with the image of a exaggerated human being, like most superhero comicbook artists does.

Here we have the same man, but with colors. Even the butterfly has been colored. Good for it.
The point of this was to play around with how to avoid mono-colored skin and actually make it look more human, and make it interact with possible light sources. I used a "make-up" brush on Adobe Photoshop, which can be found on deviantart.com for free, and gently brushed the skin with it to make certain areas darker then others and give the skin some contrast. I kept the dark outlines too, since I have a soft spot for that kind of art-direction.