For the past two years, the direction most of my art has been was practice with different coloring techniques, after a lot of experimentation I have found the technique that I find the most fun to do, and provides a result closest to what I want.

Foreground characters and bright lighting on backgrounds is done with coloured pencil, with a layer of white coloured pencil over it to give a slightly glossy finish.
backgrounds are done with watercolour paint, applied using a cotton swab, rather than a brush.

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/30031881/ is the example that made me convinced I have worked out a technique that works for me, since that drawing uses more vibrant colours than I'm used to, and it also blends background and foreground elements, without an obvious indication what is done with paint, and what is pencil, which was a key issue I had with my earlier works when I started using watercolour paint.

After years of teaching myself techniques for drawing, I feel I finally have the look and style I want down, so my next steps to contiune this hobby will be to work more on things like lines, posing, angles, lighting, and even some simple animations.
This will mean for the next while I won't be focusing on full colour drawings, instead more drawings in shaded pencil only, in order to practice the basics, now that I know I can do colouring well enough for my own standards.