Digital portrait painting

Hello everyone, how are you all today? I hope everyone is having a fantastic day.
Today i am here to share a new digital portrait painting that i made. Before i get into all this i have to say this drawing just became another one of my most favorite. I did not expect it to turn out the way it did but i am super happy about the result.

This is the final drawing.

Below are some process shots and a bit of description telling you how made approached this drawing.

Process

This portrait drawing is one of those drawing where the head is in a little bit of a difficult angle. But after a loose sketch i found that it looks pretty good.
Some of the guidelines were erased before this shot was taken, i didn't use the circle method but parrellel lines for this drawing as well.

I didn't want to clean up the sketch because that sort of kills the fun, as i have said before. if i clean up the sketch i immediately feel a pressure to not make any mistakes and can not let myself loose to work on a drawing. and so i immediately started coloring with a hard round brush that has some pressure opacity.
i was extremely quick with the first step of coloring, as you can see i have even started some random skin shading even before applying the colors properly.
This helped a lot because i could see the drawing getting better and better.

after drawing a little bit of the eyes and lips, i focused on the hair, with my newly found method of drawing it on one layer.
put down a little bit of color in here and there like the shirt to get a better sense of the shape and the light source.

i copied the skin layer a few times and merged them together to remove any low opacity area that looked like a gap and then blended the skin color to get a smoother feel.

I couldn't help myself but draw a few highlights at this point, because why not?