Oh wow, what an amazing comment, thank you so much for taking the time to write all this! ♥
I love iconing Chi cause so many different colors and styles fit her + she's just so gorgeous :D

Your use of textures is so interesting to me because for the most part, it's very different from the way I use them. It seems you start with a texture and build, while I start with the cap and end up layering textures on top.

A very good observation about the texture use! You're totally right that I start with a texture pretty often, not always but sometimes, especially if I want compositiony texture use as opposed to enhancement texture use which is easy to add to any cap so they can be chosen later. But with stock, paint, decorative, geometric or other visible composition textures I have to start with the texture, cause it's easier for me to find a cap that fits a texture than to start with a cap and go through my 100,000 textures searching for something that fits a particular cap (no kidding, that's almost the exact count o_O). So, it's not purposeful strategy as much as just something to preserve my sanity :D
...However I must admit I often just randomize both the cap and the textures cause I'm extremely lazy x)

I had a few questions about 27: did you know you wanted to use that color palette? How do you get coloring like that? With gradients?

Oh, tbh I don't really remember the process of making it, it's one of the oldest icons here so I don't really know how I ended up with that color scheme; I think it's quite close to the colors of the original cap so it didn't take much thinking, except the background color which i could freely pick, and this time I chose pale green just cause I usually pick cyan so I wanted that one to be slightly different, but still pastelly :D
as for how I did the coloring in general, I first made it brighter and less contrasted with gradient maps on soft light, which also made everything muted and skin-toned, and then I just used two separate Selective color layers to color her hair and shirt (everything else masked out of the layers but the element I was coloring). I hope this makes any sense and answers your question but if not, I'll be happy to explain it better :)

sorry about the rambly answer and thanks again for the fantastic comment!