Going for the soft visually tangible images eh?

Then I'll share this theory I've recently understood
Usually amateurs who are lineart dependent (like you possibly) would think:
Sketch->Lineart->Color->Finished
But that process alone is not effective for every style. I've done that so many times before I realized that was mainly the reason to why I feel my work is too incomplete.
The process above works only for hard shade styles as the lineart is thick and perfect and the colors are intended to be extremely well distinguished from each other (very different hues, saturations, luminosities)

For the soft shade artist however, the lines should be negligible or invisible. It shouldn't take the attention of the viewer.
So the process Sketch->Lineart->Color will not work, and tendency is, you'll be spending too much time doing the lineart then after coloring it, you'd feel that it looks ugly and unrefined.
After studying much of Faust's works and using T2's c78 and then comparing it with many other artists' works I saw the discrepancies I needed to confirm to change such a process. If you look at Faust's videos, he does everything crudely but in the end, things harmonize. This is taken from his habit of adding details while coloring. A very painterly way of doing things and basically a painter is a soft shade artist, they don't use hard colors, they blend and make new ones in between.
Sketch->Color->Lineart->Finish
I used that method in my latest work and I plan to use it in everything else. The idea is to sketch your usual crude drawing with the many errors in it. Color it crudely, but taking emphasis on the details, to make things come to life building a lineart from the color. Then put in the highlights and the shades in the form of a Lineart. Another way of imagining this has already been very nicely done by Cypress in his Concept Art 101. In essence you start with a blot of mess and then mold your way into it. Very painterly but really easier to manipulate. This works far better than doing lineart first, coloring and then coloring the lineart to make it disappear.

Another trick to lineart for a soft shade artist is the opacity change. If you know how that works if you did the method Color->Lineart then it is understood that your color has been spilling outside of your lineart and you'll be erasing to to fit the lineart now. You don't have to make it exact though, because when your lineart is made of solid black instead of colored lines, simply changing opacity to <30% makes your lineart a shade of the base color, still denoting the shape of the figure, but not sticking out like a regular lineart.

Another method here is to duplicate the lineart. A duplicated lineart or tracing the lineart now sets another form of shade, change opacity to something lower than the original lineart makes it look like a shade. >_> Though what I do is to first lineart portions needed to be dark with a color shade, then lineart over it with black on another layer, using a smaller pixel pen, lower opacity...then you get that pecuilar quality.

Well, such tricks are my own anyway, you don't have to press yourself to do them, what is important is to understand then pave your own way xD.