The start of a new commission

My tiger drawing has been set to one side for a while as i have a new commission to undertake and time is a little short as the drawing is wanted for a birthday.The subjects of this drawing will be a very handsome pair of german pointers full of character that i hope to get across in the finished piece.It has taken a couple of days to get the dogs sketched out to a nice size and having stretched the paper ive made a start on one of the dogs.regular readers of my blog will know that i build up my images using many layers of graphite applied with a full range of pencils,starting with the harder grades and gradually working my way through the softer grades in turn.here you can see my outline that ive transposed from the rough 'working out' paper onto stretched HP watercolour paper and my initial layers of graphite that have been applied.ive applied two layers of H grade pencil over most of the face as a starting point and now i'm working up the details by layering from H thru to 2B grades so far on the left hand side of the dogs face.the ear is pretty much complete and im busy layering and blending over the rest of the face until shape,form and tone is correct and then i can add fur details etc.there is a good deal of careful blending to be carried out as the dog has a lovely shiny coat that i want to stand out.at this stage i'm blending using just the pencil and variable pressures to acheive the required result.