Working in illustrator...

I work in illustrator for my day job and I never really thought about using it for my freelance work. Below I have the flat colors, then added texture, and in the last one I removed the texture from the face of the character. I've been playing with this idea of keeping the skin of my characters without texture....I want the texture to do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to shading but I also want you to be able to see the face clearly and and I feel that in the middle image the face gets lost. So I think finding this balance of texture here and there is going to be an editing dance I will have to do based on each illustration and it wont be a step by step process for me.... #figuringitout