You may have seen artists using a wide variety of pencils for making one drawing. Or you might have even tried it before. What makes we do this? Why won't we could use only one pencil instead of having many?
While making drawing with pencils we could use one dark pencil - like I would say an 8B grade pencil - and use it wisely with varying pressure and make changes in its contrast on the paper. When we apply more pressure it gives us strong black and when we use it lightly it gives light shades. But, this may cause damage to our paper. When we strike it hard there is a big chance of damaging the surface. So there comes the use of different grades of pencils.
If we use different pencils of a varying grade like Hb, 2B, 3B, 4B etcetera in proper positions as per requirement we could have a wonderful gradual change in the shades and shade strength without making the paper ugly.
Finally I used the most darker pencil I had which is 8B and I managed to raise some sharp edges in the darker portions and places where needed extreme dark shades like in the dress part in this sketch.
Another important part in pencil drawing is the highlights. Here I didn't used any tools to bring the highlights into ply, instead I left spaces for it as per the reference picture needed, so I will talk about the importance of highlighting in another post soon.
So I got the final drawing like this.
Drawing
Find me here
@artographer