xWayu

The face and hair (inside the hood) look great. Everything was looking good, then I scrolled down and I became sad.

The proportions on the body are not great, as well as the positioning of the legs. I guess you just wanted to finish the part that you'd use as your avatar and ignore the rest of it, but still "finish" it.

Spot on. Even now I look at the head and smile but then I look down and get sad ;p.

Yeah, that's pretty much it. I worked so hard on the head but I got so tired because Illustrator demands a lot from you.

Several times in I realized some parts of my original drawing were either too vague or just incorrect: had it been on Photoshop, I could have just redrawn it and paint over it and it would have been fixed; on Illustrator, it meant redefining all the lines, reshading, and sometimes changing the entire composition of the existing vectors. As soon as I finished the chest, I realized I didn't really like the lower body and especially the hair in the back but I was already too far in to change things... And so I became extremely unmotivated to finish and put it off for like a week.

Couple things I've learned:

1) Whatever you draw on Illustrator, make dam sure you original drawing is perfect and pretty much a final draft. Illustrator is not really meant for creating things on the fly and it's much harder to draw things from scratch if you need something to replace an error.

2) Don't shade, highlight, or do touch ups until everything is finished. It's a waste of time if everything else isn't finished because a single error could render your touch ups useless.

3) When you're creating resources for your illustration, make it as modular as possible. Don't abuse shapebuilder. Don't abuse blob brush. Make entire shapes and don't prematurely cut them up unless you're in the final stage of the drawing. Use lines to make lines; do not use shapes to build lines ie blob brush.

4) Always save and make multiple copies of your work. I'm making the habit of using save as exclusively and labeling the new files with a time stamp and a summary of what I did. This way, you can always have the resources from the past just in case a change didn't work out.

I'm not happy with how this turned out but it's taught me a lot of things. I'll be sure to make my next one blow you guys away .