I'd been working on these poses for some time now, went through a few revisions of the story before getting to this point, but I wanted this scene to happen this way and despite having much less going on, it needed to feel right. You might notice the lighting is brighter despite still being mostly in shadow, I'm revising my shading methods again and trying to use more of the flat color than relying on the darker shading like I had been.
What I think was happening before with them looking too dark was due to making the flat the brightest area, rather than making the flats 40% of the color you see. So it should, corrected this way, look a lot brighter than it did. I'm easing off of using extreme darks, at least until later when they aren't outdoors on a bright summer day. Still, things look a bit too washed out, so I need to try more subtle shading next time.