I feels great to see that you are investing in drawing for having fun rather than drawing every piece with stress of result. For your concern over muddy colour and flattening shadows, there are two thing i would like to suggest. One will serve you right away for making your artworks more "Dramatic" and intentful with light and shadows, and the second one for a long term goal of being able to draw realistic, and three dimensional light and shadow intuitively. While reading this, keeping in mind would help that values are always a premise to colour and painting. Good values applied with same valued colour almost always gives a realistic result ( colour temperature and code , all as "Advanced") So, lets begin with short term solution for more dramatic values. The short answer is, explore more value compositions before you settles on one. Muddy values, leading to muddy colours mostly occurs when you don't push light and dark ratio on your artwork that much or in a intentional direction. This causes the artwork to become "Flat" with composition as the viewer dont know where to look at. To solve this, before we decides to refine and finalize a artwork by putting in shadows and textures, we first explore different ways in which we could guide the viewers eyes on the artwork by using light and shadows . That's for compositional values. Now the long term solution for realistic light and shadow intuitively I would suggest you to have a process for drawing light and shadow. The reason for this is that frequently used methods with enough consistency eventually leads to a habit formation. When the habit of doing "realistic" light and shadow forms , you would naturally be able to draw better light and shadow intuitively. The process i personally uses for more accurate light and shadow is a four step process. First i likes to establish beforehand the specific position and type of light source we have. Next, i establishes the planes of the form i am drawing. Then i likes to map our my shadows on the form by comparing the relative angles of the planes with light source. Last step is to just fill in the shadows with the pre mapped out values. ( Artwod treated my tips as "username" , so had to red mark those. First one reads "Use simple cube for simplicity" and second one as " Use dimple gesture drawing with contour for exploring ")

@fosco

Paintover

Hello there! Nice work so far! I like the “crush” idea! You could extend the statue so it feels grounded—right now it reads a bit like it’s floating, which breaks the sense of weight. Given its mass, it should clearly connect to the ground. I also adjusted the hue of the background rocks, since they were too similar to the mermaids’ shirts and started blending together. Separating those colors helps readability. Adding some lighting that highlights the statue would strengthen the focal point. And overall, introducing clearer shadow work on the characters, the statue, and the scene in general will help add volume and depth. Hope this helps!