Doodles and Finished Pieces

[E-Man]

With a little bit of free time, I decided to pick up progress on a drawing I was intending to finish.

   

At first, I decided to use desaturated highlights and shadows, but after I heard a comment from Vipershark about how he actually uses saturated shadows instead, I decided to experiment with the possibility of a new palette. The yellow orb on the right is with the old one, while the one on the left is with the new palette.

An immediate problem I ran into while trying this out was how to get the saturation to work just right. When using my base colors, they are already extremely saturated. With my old palettes, this wasn't a problem because I was desaturating the colors both ways. For the new one, however, it wouldn't do jack-squat if I increased the saturation for the shadows. With that in mind, the only thing I could do is desaturate the base color instead, so I could use a saturated shadow. Of course, with this in mind, I only managed to create one shade as opposed to the usual two I work with. Which approach to the palette do you like the best?

As for that red orb bellow, it is actually done with my new palette. The only difference is that I used a new shading style that doesn't look like a gradient because I turned off the feather edge on my brush when creating it. What do you think?