Recital Drawing - In Progress

I've been making slow progress (enjoying the warm weather and busy with other stuff too) on a new colored pencil drawing of children at a recital. In the progress photo shown here you can see that I am working left to right in order to avoid smudging the pencil on the sanded paper. This makes it difficult to judge the piece as a whole, but my plan is to make final adjustments once I've laid down most of the pigment (and the pencil is less smudgy).

This piece started off as a really rough 3x4 grid drawing on 18"x24" paper, based on a 6"x8" photograph divided similarly. You can see here that I really haven't gotten any details down, but rather just made markings to place the composition elements. I don't like to start with too many details early on because then I get bogged down and lose sight of the overall proportions.

After getting the basic drawing down, I start creating contours with a dark green, red, or blue. I work very quickly in order to get the basic impressions of the drawing, knowing that I will be laying down various other darks, mid-tones, and lights later on, thereby continuously refining my drawing. Another reason I like to work quickly in the initial stages is to allow my subconscious mind to work and get a more intuitive depiction of the people or objects, rather than slavishly copying a photo in a more mechanical fashion.