Case In Point (UPDATED May 16th)

I recently had a book turned down at a trade publisher, after serious consideration and a revision. Part of the reasoning was that they found the dummy sketches to be very charming but not so much with my finished art. I'm dabbling with a new illustration and I'm starting to see what they mean. The rough illustration below shows the rough pencil line AND the cleaned up version. I clean up my line work to the point where it is a bit lifeless and has lost a bit of its 'edginess'. Which do you prefer??

I am going to try and trust myself a bit more and not worry so much about making mistakes. Here are some more choices...

#1 is taking the first rough sketch, adding a rough acrylic wash and colored pencil accents on pastel paper.
#2 is the same but taking it a step further with brushed black line work. I think this one pops a bit more but has lost some of the warmth of the original sketch and maybe my lines are too thick in places with not enough variety of line weight... thoughts??
HERE IS THE 3rd ATTEMPT...
this is taking the painting and placing it behind the original sketch in photoshop... might be too muddy though because of original 6B graphite pencil shading... getting closer but still more work to do...

LOTS OF MONKEYS

ABOVE IS THE FINAL


color combos for a T-Shirt for a coffee shop... there's a set of duplicates in there by mistake... can you find em?

I LOVE YOU BABY, YOU'VE GOT TO GO (TO SLEEP)

Here is a a video I have been working on since December for a Jingle Punks' music video for a kids DVD.
you may have to copy and paste this link (super low-res, but you'll get the gist...):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoLRW2LjWmM

I did all the illustrations by hand (colored pencils) then scanned them into Photoshop and cut them up and put them in Flash, where i did all the animation. Really put Flash to the limits. Higher resolution screen grabs below...