Start of a new commissioned drawing

Not very exciting to look at i know but this is the very initial stages of my latest project.The drawing is a commissioned piece featuring a lovely labrador called Amber whom i was privileged to spend a couple of hours with getting some lovely reference photo's and just generally getting a handle on the dogs character to try and get that across in the finished drawing.what you see here so far is the result of a couple of days work.the first stage in all my drawings is naturally to work up an outline from my references on bits of old cartridge paper which once i'm happy with it i trace onto my prepared drawing paper.the paper is hot pressed watercolour paper which has been immersed in water and then stretched onto my drawing board and left to dry overnight,this results in a lovely subtle 'tooth' which grabs just the right amount of graphite without being too rough or smooth.the next stage of this particular drawing is to create an abstract,blurry background to enhance and push forward the dogs head.here i have already painstakingly layed down one layer of H grade pencil over a period of hours and now i'm beginning a second layer using the same pencil.as i work up the background i will progress through several different grades of pencil,layering and blending as i go to create the effect i want to achieve.the background alone is likely to take many days to get right until i can make a start on the animal itself.as a final note i'd like to add that in the last week i had a bit of a disaster with my laptop which i managed to well and truly fry and lost a good deal of data and in particular most of my email contacts and so i would be obliged if any of my clients reading this would be good enough to just drop me a line so that i can retrieve email and contact details.luckily my photo library is safe and sound and i'm slowly getting to grips with my new laptop and new operating system.