The Mediocre Hiatus (ha, ha)

Hm. I feel a bit stuck. I'm just wondering whether to even colour this in at all.

The first one is the original, unaltered lineart (save for some cropping, levelling and colour-balancing);

As you can see, Holmes is very distressed as he climbs up the mountain.

On this one, I've added a bit of shading (since this scene takes place at night) and shadows. 

And for this one, I've just overlayed an old paper texture over to give it a bit more colour and well, texture. I do quite like this one, although I feel it may be a bit unnecessary and a bit cheap-looking (as in, oh, she just slapped on a texture, that lazy lazybones).

So as you can see, I am a little bit stuck. It's just, I feel like something is missing -- I think it might be a lack of a definitive light source or the contrast between the darkest and lightest shades isn't strong enough or...something. And yet, when I do attempt to do that, it somehow also looks very forced and unnatural.

What do you think? *flails*

I'm using this artist for reference -- she does it so beautifully. Maybe you can look at her work and tell me what she's doing that I'm not!