I've only just recently found success in laying out a painting in greyscale first before moving to color. This is because your values have to be perfect, or near perfect, in order to get your colors to work. Additionally, using the color layer in photoshop over a grayscale image is much less intuitive than pushing actual paint. I've found that using the blending modes (you can find this under layers, there is an icon of a circle with a half white, half gray circle) to be much more effective. When I get my values working really well, I first use the COLOR BALANCE blending mode to get about 70-75% of the way to matching the color I want. Then I use the HUE/SATURATION blending mode, followed by CURVES to make sure my values didn't get out of hand. I usually repeat that process about 1 or 2 times to get to the color I want. The upside is that this allows you to be flexible with the way you change colors in your painting. You can make minute details to certain areas, or just scrap something without destroying the painting underneath. The downside is that you have to be pretty organized with your layers to make sure separate pieces of your painting are on separate layers, and that can get pretty daunting/tedious for some people. Alternatively, I just prefer to do direct color painting and using the aforementioned blending modes to make slight tweaks. I also just realized that the instructions I just laid out were pretty specific to photoshop, so apologies in advance if you happen to be using a different program

Hi! I'm really liking these pears! The brushwork is nicely done. Your shadows in the color study have a nice warmth to them, and to get the colors to pop more, maybe try to push a cooler color note to the highlight. I think maybe adding a core shadow might really help describe the form more as well.

Hi Psylite 😁 cool little pair of pears! I also dislike greyscale to color. You could try a monochrome underpainting instead in the base color of the subject, in this case a greeny yellow underpainting rather than grey. I always find that works better, for me at least, than a monochrome underpainting.