A found object - thought process and character development

Before I started colouring my final image I wanted to get an idea of how I would colour it. Lately I have been working with a limited colour palette. I have also limited the amount of shading that goes into my imagery because in the past I have added too much to my line work which took some of the quality away from the final image.
Over the summer I made a few pieces that were really restricted in terms of colour, below are a few of them.

That seemed to work pretty well and it was also good to limit myself. Going back to top image of inspiration pictures I seemed to look at a lot of adventure time pieces, I like how each element just has 1 or 2 colours, that could be something to look into.

Click to enlarge 

Above is the final line work for this workshop, not sure if cutting off the umbrella at the bottom is going to be a problem, I feel like because other elements are also out of shot it will be okay but i'll have to see. Whilst thinking about stage two of this module I knew my focus would be on character design and the application of such. After bouncing ideas around with piers I decided that it would be great to make some cartoon title cards that would feature some of the characters I have made throughout this module. This image in particular kind of looks like a title card already and the 'POOF' text along with the faces on the inanimate objects remind me of the title cards from 'The Fairly Odd Parents', examples below.

Taking some of these images into consideration along with my original research I started to colour my image.

The image on the left is the original image with the line work unchanged, I was fairly happy with it but I was still unsure of the brolly in the bottom left hand corner. I felt like because the story originated from a umbrella handle it should play a larger role in the image or at least not be cut off. So on the right is my finished version, I shrunk the umbrella down so it would fit in the image fully without having to be cropped out and I much prefer it like this.

Despite that there are over 10 different colours in this image I still feel like it is minimal and the shading is only used on certain elements which was the desired effect that I was going for. The image is incredibly busy but the vibrant colours do a good job at keeping everything separated. I like that this does look like a title card and I'd like to explore that concept if I have the time, maybe single out the wizard character and sit a title along/ or in his beard.

Looking at The Fairly Odd Parents images which featire the objects with faces you can see that one has green eyes and the other pink, they relate to the characters Cozmo and Wanda who act as the main character's god parents. These characters can change at will and the only way the viewer knows that it is in fact them is by the green and pink eyes that distinguish the two. I wanted to do something similar with my characters as I took the Grey and Blue swatch and applied it to the objects. Over all I am pretty happy with the result but in the future I should be careful of making my image too busy, I should also consider layout more before finalization.