There was a little scare earlier because I couldn't find my camera but I found it, YAY! So I get to post this update afterall. If you enlarge the picture above, you'll see how I'm using a bristle brush to push and spread the graphite into the paper. I'm doing this because the paper has too much tooth for me to get a smooth finish with just the pencil alone. If I were using a hot pressed paper like Stonehenge, I would skip this step. Once that's done I start placing some general dark areas within the shadow shape to start to gradually break things up. I'll show that step in the next post.
That brings me to the issue of "smudging": I don't like smudging, that's why I will have to go over this whole drawing with just my sharp pencil and refine my tones. Basically, this is the only time in the drawing I'll be using my brush or anything else in that manner. It'll be my pencils and my kneadable eraser from now on. That being said, holy crap, this drawing is gonna take forever! There's a reason why I don't love graphite, this is why. But graphite does have that subtle shine that can give a drawing that special quality, unlike any other medium.
I'm showing a little picture of my pencil as well to show you how it looks. I really can't use a pencil that's not sharp on this paper because every stroke needs to be clean, I can't have any graininess. But I'll explain more about how I'm shading with it next time. Thanks for following so far!
Still putting in those darks. This is helping me see the overall value range. I had to make sure I put the dark part of the hair in so that I could judge the values in the face better. She's looking like a brunette right now but she's actually blonde. What I'm doing is laying in a base to erase out of, which is the easiest way I know of to create realistic hair. There's a lot of edges to blend and I still don't know how I'll finish the bottom. Maybe I'll fade the bottom out...I don't know. 
