Getting serious on designs

[Terminal Devastation]

Oh wow. Oh wow. I sort of vaguely knew a lot of the information given, but having it repeated in clearer detail really helps.
And that super hero tip had far greater effect that I could have expected. I had previously thought just the pose would make for a pretty confident heroic looking guy but look what it did to Gold.

It turned him from a slightly confident looking dude, to someone not only heroic but HUGE... everything Gold was supposed to be.
I think I messed up his shading somewhere, and maybe caused a few angles to go awry (And I think I might have lost his sense of balance in there too), but wow... it's so worth it.

Bronze is a bit of a different story. First of, despite a miscommunication on what I wanted him to be, you're right, this is a really slacker-type pose and ill-suited for what I want him to be.
He's suposed to be more of a clever and practical fragile speedster than a lazy person.

it's less refined than gold's alteration, but I just wanted to feel out a few poses and see if any of them give off the right impression (first ones I used a donatello as a pose reference, the second is what I thought the spear users in Castlevania: Harmony of dissonance used, third is what they actually use)
Also tried out a different pallete for bronze. I'm liking the contrast better on it... but I still don't like it. It's creeping into wood/clay pallete territory, and I'm not sure how to fix that. I've tried a lot just to get to the first pallete, using references for real life bronze statues, adding green as a shade (that ended up cluttering everything)... trying more red. But I really need to make sure bronze is bronze and not wood clay or copper. Especailly copper.
The three knights have a rival knight each. Iron for Silver, Brass for Gold
and this guy:

is the shady merchant knight Copper, Bronze's rival.
So I need my palletes pretty exacting, so they look like different materials.
(I actually have other things sprited for this, Like Iron and Brass, but I'm wanting to focus more on a few things first rather than the whole lot of them.)