Okay, I was gonna PM but I guess since SlogBait thinks it's more useful out in the open I might as well. Pretty much following up from what he was saying.
When I said to draw a light sketch in as few lines as possible, I meant something like this
(The beard part is darker because I was starting to render it before I remembered to take a picture). As you can see it's just very light outlines, mainly single strokes just to build up the form. I only took the pencil off the paper a few times. The total time for this sketch was about 3 minutes.
And here it is after I rendered it
I tried to show my shading process here with the head being the most rendered then decreasing down the body.
I also used to chickenscratch really badly, here's a year ago vs a wip from now. (sorry for anime shit).
You can see the difference. Also the old picture took about an hour+ whereas the newer one took about 10 minutes. Proportions are way easier to get too since you're looking at the canvas space as a whole rather than focusing on carving out a small area.
When colouring this can be useful too since you don't have to do a million lineart layers, here you can also see what I was saying about changing the colour of the lines to match the picture.
vs
which was their original colour.
A good practice for not chickenscratching and using space effectively is
posemaniacs 30 second pose drawings btw since you don't have time to draw a million lines. Also I very very much recommend sketching stuff in pen as practise, really helps with your control and getting stuff right first time which boosts speed.
Okay I think that's about all from me.