Progression of my Favorite Illustrator Drawing I've done

So I decided to keep showing my older work for now so that my blog doesn't jump back and fourth between what I've been doing recently and what I have done before.

So for anyone that doesn't know Illustrator, the program I used for this drawing is basically for graphic design purposes mostly.  It's a vector based program which means no matter how much you zoom in and down you're not going to lose quality of the images because everything is done with numbers.  So for instance if you zoom in on this photo in photoshop or a regular image viewing program, you're going to get pixelation to the image and especially if you save over an image and resize it it's never going to be in as good of quality as the first one no matter how high the resolution you save it in (always thought that was interesting.)

So anyways this program I used to draw is basically as if I were to cut out all different little sequencing colors of paper layer them and glue them down...for hours and hours and hours.  And, well, quicker than at least real life doing it.  Usually you can easily start with an under-layer of a photograph so it's easy to pick up the colors and the shapes.  

Here's how I did. :D

Initial image

Progression.  You can tell it's done with small shapes a lot here.
You can also see where the new things are going to be drawn
like the flowers on my wrist for instance. 

Example of the progression I made.  I had initially wanted to draw
the bg and my friend Erin in the black dress but I ran out of time for it.

Final product

The ugly side of the drawing.  Kinda weird to see ALLLL
of the lines that went in to do even just this little part of the picture.  Basically this is an
image of every stroke I made to make all of the little graphic shapes to
make the final product sans any color.

Ahh, so proud of this drawing.  I still have the original illustrator file and sometime when I get the free time I want to be able to draw the whole thing so I don't have the boring background and so I can get Erin in there as well.  Someday hopefully :D