Early shades

I have started on my next piece. This is almost the first stage, as the first lines didn't seem to get picked up by the scanner. I am drawing this one freehand (as usual) with a col-erase black pencil. The pencil is really smooth to work with, but is not good for getting dark dark's, but I'm not there yet. I got the pencil tip from http://www.drawing-tutorials-online.com which I found to be a really useful site.

Here I started the line drawing on my angled drawing board to help reduce perspective errors, then took it of the angled board to scan it and carry on shading on a flatter board that is less cumbersome to use and allows me to rotate the paper more.

The image here is dark as the pencil is still really light. I start shading the dark areas first, but only lightly so as to allow for corrections.