new graphite commission

Its been a while since i completed a graphite drawing from scratch,and so before approaching this latest commission i 'warmed up' by re-hashing my barn owl drawing as described in an earlier post.Having finally managed to get the outline and main tonal areas plotted to my satisfaction i traced the rough drawing outlines from my working out sheet onto the stretched and prepared watercolour paper that i like to use for graphite works.The canine subject is quite a pale dog with quite contrasting dark areas and so in order to make portraying the rather subtle tone changes in the paler areas a little more easy i decided to first set in stone the darker areas of the dogs face mainly around the muzzle.starting with the darker areas first gives me a great reference point for the paler areas and means i dont have to be quite so tentative about applying graphite to those areas as its easier to judge when ive worked up the tone to a dark enough level.I'm a little rusty with the pencils and so i'm taking it easy whilst i get my eye in and this is today's efforts.in the top photo you can see that i first worked up the nose and then ive started to apply layers of tone to the muzzle,in this case a layer of H grade pencil followed carefully with some HB and so forth untill in the bottom photo you can see that the muzzle is almost fully worked up with fur details added.where there are lighter hairs within darker masses of fur ive employed the indenting technique to leave some nice clean white fur detail.