Hello, again.
biggrin I really love your character design! It seems so bright, fresh, and fun.
What I think is wrong with your coloring is that you are using straight, completely unsaturated purples for your shading. Because purple is the darkest color on the color wheel, and you have it directly next to an unsaturated tannish color, the colors are clashing and competing for attention. I take it that you already know your complimentary color sets... There is some yellow in the tan, and that yellow is what is causing it to clash with the purple.
To remedy this, I would suggest to tone down on the purple. While it's a fine color to have in there (it's wonderful for dramatic lighting
biggrin ), I think that it's the amount of it that's making the coloring look bad. Now, that is not to say that you should take it away. I think that the best way to reduce the purple would be to blend your colors.
Right now, it looks like you're using three basic tones: the pinkish highlights, the tan skin, and the purple. I think that adding more tan tones and blending your colors together would make it look more realistic. For instance:
Here I've got your base color. I've addressed where the lights and shadows are ('cause that's what I always do at this point X{P).
In this stage, I've picked my highlight and shadow for the tan. I didn't use different shades of the same color, but I used ones that were very close to the tan. The highlight has more yellow in it, and the shadow has more red-- but only a bit. I've got both new colors on the palette on the side.
Now, I've added in your highlight and shadow from the original picture.
Now, this is where the blending begins. Everyone has their own way of doing it, but this is how I do it. It's kinda cheap, but it's quick and easy and works in most programs. There are a lot of ways that look better.
You notice how there is a (somewhat) smooth transition from pink, to yellow, to tan, to brown, to purple? In this stage, I selected the color I wanted more of (in this case, the tan, because the purples and pinks were overpowering it), set my brush to 25% opacity, and went over the area I wanted less of in a single, very wide stroke. Then I would lessen the size of my brush as I moved closer to to the original color.
So, say, with the yellow, I made one broad stroke that was able to cover the edge of the pink and where the yellow meets the tan. Then, I made my brush slightly smaller, and went over the middle of the where I had just layed down the first stroke. I repeated this until there was a smooth transition.
One thing I've noticed while using this method of blending is that light colors require less transparency to overpower a color, while dark colors take a higher transparency to achieve the same effect. When I tried to go over the purple, my original brown shade was no match for it, so I had to introduce a slightly redder brown (shown as the top color on the tan palette in the fourth picture) at a 45% opacity to blend effectively.
I chose adding red to the shadows because red is closer to the deep purple that you chose for your shadows. In this case, deep purple was the most powerful color on your palette, so you needed colors that transitioned from brown to purple so that it wouldn't be so close to the yellow. The reason I could use a yellow-tan for the highlights is because the pink color that you chose was already very saturated with white, so the relatively unsaturated yellow did not need as much effort to overpower it.
I hope I'm making sense, I really tried my best.
xd sweatdrop 
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