beginning a pile o' beans

I started something today that I might spend a very long time on, a pile of beans:

I was sketching in cowpeas a while ago for an illustration and I really liked the way they looked when I had just the outlines overlapping each other. I thought then that it would be neat to do do a painting of that, but with lots of colors blending into each other too. So, now is the time. I think this might take forever since it will take a long  time to do each outline and then I will probably want to rework it all, but I have this vision in my head of the end product that looks really neat. Hopefully I can get close to that.