New drawing,new pencils

Well here we are again,back at the board and raring to go!.Ive spent 2 days gradually building up the tone in the background of this one using H,HB and B grade pencils layered several times over to create this abstract cloudy-ish toning.Happy with progress so far ive now started to add tone to the ears of the subject and will be going very dark here as the animal is a black leopard and therefore there will be lots of layering going on!.After my initial layer of H grade pencil had been laid down an eagerly awaited package arrived bearing some new pencils that ive been wanting to try out after having a brief scribble with some at a friends gallery.I used a blending stump and blended the original layer of H grade pencil before proceeding to over-layer with the H,HB and B grade pencils from my new batch.Normally i use derwent graphics exclusively but like many pencils they do occasionally(and i have to say it seems to be more now)have those annoying hard graphite bits in them that ruin any attempt at smooth layering.My new toys that i'm trying out are the grafwood range of pencils from caran d'ache which are,so far at least very smooth with no 'bits' whatsoever.they are also slightly wider with a wider lead strip than the derwents.i shall be using these for the initial layering upto 2B,softer than that i will continue to use my derwents and it'll be interesting to see how i get on.