What Do a Bucket Loader and Peony Have In Common?

      What do a peony and bucket loader have in common? Color spots of value!
     In the case of these two paintings they also have pink skies.
     I have been looking hard at the value of colors and a pink sky and a light blue sky can have  the same value. This leaves me with choices I can make that produce strong  color harmony.
     Sometimes a sky is impossibly blue. It can  almost  look like a color in a cartoon. So finding other choices in the same value range can connect my subject to the background in a way that creates cohesion.