I've lately begun sketching.
My first draft is often fairly rough. You can see the shape of the narrative and some of the details, but there are no real subtleties. Sometimes, I'm tempted to stop there. It's good enough, isn't it? Well, no, no it's not. It's not good enough until I know, realistically, that it's the best I can do.
When you add a few more details, you can see the shape coming in in more detail, but sometimes this makes your work look choppy and uneven -- and you still don't have some elements as more than a rough outline. Keep filling in. Keep shading.
At this stage, it's sometimes helpful for a bit of professional advice, or at least to stand back and look at your work from another angle, or in the mirror. For all you know, one eye might be proportionally too large.
You're almost done, you really are. "Almost done," by the way, doesn't mean "almost perfect"; it means "almost about as good as you, with your skill level, can get it." Just a few more tweaks.
At this point, you've done as well as you can, and if you work at it any more, you'll do more damage than good. (That one spot wouldn't erase, and I was just damaging the paper.) Stop for now. It's good, and you're done. And the next one you start will be better. But before you go any further . . .
BACK UP YOUR WORK!!
The cat spilled water all over this picture. If I hadn't scanned it in at 600 dpi, I'd be really sorry right now. But because I backed it up, I can always get a decent print of it.
I once met an author who backed her book up in two places and both crashed and her computer crashed and she had to start from scratch. So back it up online and on a memory stick and with your mother/sister/best friend and in an email to yourself and in hard copy.
