Face!

I'm really pushing myself these days to go for much more defined brushwork and much crazier colors.
It's pretty challenging for me as I am always inclined to tone down and go to more desaturated pastel colors. In a lot of my paintings so far, those with bright colors are usually painted first with pastel tones, and then only brought up to speed with a curves modifier or something.
Working directly with such neon colors is a whole other world for me, but I like it very much. I also went back to the basics and toned down a lot the amount of brushes I use, this is mostly all a simple round brush, although I did use some more complex textured ones here and there, but they're scarcer, and it's more for really effects.
I also wanted to do some nutty perspective like this for a little while.

I included here some steps I go through when sketching!

PS: The Kanji on the stick means "face".

The full artwork

The Sketch

I struggled in the beginning to find colors I really liked, and so I used a lot of curve modifiers and other color balancing tools to fiddle around.
What I also do sometimes is add an RGB noise texture, and scroll through blend modes to get wacky results.

I wanted everything to echo the roundness of the eye, and have everything point to it, as much as I could anyway, I want the eye to be the fundamentally the focus so I can take a lot of freedom with the colors later on. (which was the point for me)

I also stopped and thought about the shape design of it all, though the body's shape got changed later and got fuzzier, which I think works better?

I also kept in mind throughout the painting process the level of detail I wanted every part to have.
And that also means amount of contrasts, patterns, etc, not just how rendered it would be.
But rather the "amount of visual interest" per area.