well not to OT here but there's no 'rules' on what complements what. The opposite end of the color spectrum thing is just something impressionists did. Let's not go overboard with what's 'right' and what's 'wrong'.
I tihnk it's perfectly reasonable to say that a word used against its artistic definition is artistically wrong. Red is warm by definition, and opposites are complements, dating back far further than the mid nineteenth century, the concept pertaining to colors originating during the late renaissance and being highly popular among classicist and mannerist painters alike, further explored and the common term possibly coined by isaac newton. In math, the term has existed for even longer refering to essentially the opposite set or value.
To go against several hundred years of study and theory can be really crippling for a student, not to mention confusing. If i were to say "helm, your piece is too dull right now, you should use less saturated colors," not only would I be wrong in my word choice, but if you were to try and act on this advice (or even visualize it in your mind to consider it) you would find the advice completely backwards and unuseable.
As far as the piece is concerned, im not sure its gotten any "better" since yesterday morning. I much prefer the bright wood to the dark wood, though feron's would work much better as a background (being of a much narrower range of values). I will stand by the advice i've given each time, which is that cast shadows will add a lot of depth to the piece, but since the pixels themselves are hardly chaning and only the palette is going through slight changes, I'd say it might be time to leave well enough alone and move on at least to another tree, if not something else entirely
