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Mike,
"Key" is akin to the key signature in a musical piece. Unless you're arranging a la Barry Manilow, the piece is defined by that key throughout. Think of "key" as bracketing a few contiguous values on the scale. Slide the bracket down (to fill with a darker set of values), you have a relatively lower key. Move the whole bracket to the light end, you've have a high-keyed drawing, in which darks will appear only as accents rather than value shapes.
(A side note: Masterful execution of dark accents [redundant, since "accents" are by defintion dark, but I want to be clear] in an otherwise high-key drawing is stunningly effective. A single narrow crescent or triangle of dark, placed precisely to suggest form, can win friends and influence people.)
Do what you've done -- split the bracket and send half to each end of the value scale -- and you simply have bi-polar, and there's little in my current prescriptions that can help with that (unless I mix them, and we've all seen what happens when I do that). Even Manilow would have kept the now-two different keys closer together. The hazard in the split is that the dark's weight, without intermediate values, can make the lighter passages appear unfinished. (And you might be surprised to discover how much lighter in value that coat could be drawn and still "read" as a (relatively) very dark object.)
Anyway, to Jean's point about the contour outline, I agree but that simply reflects the "single school" training I've had. I realize that others in fact favor the "outline", even when they're drawing in paint. In an extremely high-key drawing, where much of the surface remains white, there's of course not much you can do but indicate various edges and shapes by outlines, but even then you don't want to be heavy-handed about it. And when you've got a value shape coming up to that edge, it can be interesting to downplay the line so that it is the same value as the shape it is containing. (Said another way, your outlines are -- without a reason "in nature" -- darker than the value shapes immediately adjacent to them.) Easing that line value toward the value of the adjacent form, even just here and there, will have the salutary effect of adding interesting variety to that overall contour line.
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