Here's the Leonidas piece (which is located here [link]) without the line work to show my process for it.

As you can see, it looks pretty sloppy this way. It's definitely not meant to be a lineless piece. There are certain parts where it looks more like scribbles but believe it or not, that's the effect I was going for. Kind of like texturizing.

If you look at certain parts of the skin, you can see where I've still used some slight gradients. I wasn't quite ready to TOTALLY abandon my usual way of adding colours but I think the combination of brush strokes and grads worked pretty well.

For the most part, my colours have been fairly smooth lately. Smooth gradients. Smooth fills. Scribbling was fun!