Art Video of the Week - Graphite Blending

This week I've been doing some sketching using graphite since I tend to carry a small Moleskine sketchbook and a tin of pencils with me. Most of the time, I'm largely just doodling, but sometimes I get a bit more into the drawing, hence this week's video.

So, this week, I wanted to do a video on graphite shading a blending as a few people commented about that when they saw some of the sketching I was doing. Strathmore Artist Papers has a number of online videos including this one on blending techniques:

The video shows a number of ways you can tackle the blending and one way, your finger, that you shouldn't be doing. As for what triggered it? Here's a couple of sketches I did this week:

Sorry about the graphite sheen, hard to avoid with an iPhone photograph.