RR Illustration Timelapse 1 (rough pencils)

Hey everybody! 

Since this is going to be a pretty involved illustration, I thought I'd record my process in various stages for you to see! I'm VERY VERY NEW at video uploading and editing and all that, so please bear with me. 

I'm sorry I wasn't able to record the thumbnail stage of this! Honestly I drew the idea out pretty quickly one afternoon and only later was like huh, I should add the guys down in the corner there and turn this into an illustration maybe?? 

Here's a quick breakdown of these two stages in my process: 

THUMBNAILS: the ugliest, quickest, messiest start you can possibly imagine. I'm really just trying to gage sizing and placement of major shapes and elements. I will redraw the same line or figure a bunch of times and not erase any of it, so things get incomprehensible pretty quickly. This stage is best done at a very small scale, like tiny in a notebook or really zoomed out on the computer screen. 

ROUGH PENCILS (we are here): So I redrew the same lines and figures 100 times, right? This is the stage where I try to pick which one of those options is the right one. If the thumbnails are already pretty solid, this will look a lot like retracing the same wobbly sketchy lines, with a bit of cleanup for clarity. You can see in the video I was trying to figure out where to place some big rectangular signage to add a bit of interest, but the shapes disrupted the flow of what I've already got, so I didn't make any major additions. This is also a handy stage to start figuring out contrast for grayscale or color. In the end, I should more or less understand what the whole illustration is going to look like, but it's still very messy. 

The next stage would be TIGHT PENCILS, but sometimes they're not necessary, especially for little background details that are going to get bumped back in the color stage anyways. I will probably clean up Rob and Andy a little more before I shift to inks. 

I'm thinking about trying a more textural approach with my inking in this piece, as you can see at the end of the video. Still not sure whether I'm gonna go for it or not? 

Here are some in-progress shots: 

I feel pretty confident when I'm penciling and inking but I'm very worried to record my coloring process because that's an extreme crapshoot that might take 1 hour or 1 week. WE'LL SEE WHEN WE GET THERE!!