Experimenting with heavy texture...

Yesterday I discovered another wonderful artist to admire and draw inspiration from: Matthieu Forichon. Here's his blog. His style is almost reminiscent of Galaxy Express 999, but FRENCH and awesome. I think he does most of his stuff in photoshop with varied brushes and texture overlays...at least that's what I've gathered from his blog (its all in French and I can only understand about 2 words - the ones that look most like english words! haha).
Also helping me understand more about texture was a making-of video I saw yesterday. The making of a short film called The Tale of How, explained layering textures and video (which is totally something I've never thought of doing before!) footage together for a very organic look and feel, even for 3D. I think it mentions having over 300 layers of stuff in a single scene! holey moley!
Anyways, I decided to do my own Forichon-texturemania-inspired piece.

For posterity's sake, I'll include a step-by-step sort of thing, so you can see what it came from! teehee!
Ok, Step 1:

Sketch! I do thumbnails as tiny as humanly possible - i think this is about an inch by 2 inches. >.<;;

Step 2:

Illustrator-ma-fy it! Penned around all the shapes and did the character with different line color so I could distinguish all the bits and make it easier to fill them later.

Step 3:

Fill with color! I started with a palette from kuler, but the colors sort of had a mind of their own and went all red-bluegreen on me. hehe. Put some transparent shadows in there to get some abstract forms going in the background...

And then I plopped it in photoshop and added about three different textures to it at varying degrees of 'mulitply' and layer opacity. As well as some yellow brush work for the windows 'glowing' - I LOVE glowy effects...I dunno what it is about it, it just makes it look so much cooler. hahaha. And viola!