New Digital Portrait after a long break!

Hello everyone, I am so happy to be back to my art after so long. It's been 24 days since my last post in the sketchbook community because of the war in Ukraine which coincidentally also began on the 24th of Feb. I am finally able to be calm enough to reach out for my drawing pad to create something. Infact, I missed drawing so much that I had to wake up by 5am to do this while watching a film on Netflix in the background.

The finished work of art is what you can see below. Actually there are two variants because I didn't know which one I liked best:

Now to the steps.

I started with a very rough sketch:

Then I began to fill in the base color loosely

I was aiming for a sculpted look, so I decided to just paint in this style until I got this effect below:

I felt the colors were too saturated for today because I wanted something less predictable, so I began to work on that by adjusting the hue and saturation and that's what you can see in the original pictures I shared:

Thanks for stopping by!