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[Nathies pencil shading tutorial] still WIP

Since i got so many questions how I do pencil drawings, i decided to do a tutorial for several galleries.
My pencil drawings are living through details, dark shades and highlights. It´s no magic, with a little effort you can bring the 3rd dimension into a "flat" grey shaded pencil pic.

Let´s go. :D

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1st - the equipment.

On the bottom there is "Dirty Harry" my 18 year old, grown up smoothing stick with his own personality. :D
4 different kinds of rubbergums/sticks , technical pencils 0,5 and 0,35, HB and 2B pencils,
grahite mines in HB and 2B and on top the sharpener.
30x40 cm sketch/drawing pad.

What you don´t see here but need is a lot of patience, too.
Knowledge of drawing anatomy, folds, poses, whatever is prerequisited, I can´t show you that in this tutorial. But I´m planning to do more tutorials, facial anatomy and folds in any case.

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the sketch.

1. I start with a raw sketch, done with cheapass HB pencil.
I decided to draw a winged demon warrior, because he has feathers, a neat body,
some weapons and fantasy jewelry and floating, long hair. He has everything I need for a shading tutorial. :D

I´ll add details like necklaces, changing the floating in the folds of the loincloth f.e. later. Just to have a basic sketch for the pose.

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Step 2
Is the sketch done, I´m taking a fat HB graphit mine and add the first raw shades.

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Step 3
Time for "Dirty Harry": Smoothing the shades. I left the raw light spots out and wiped only the shaded areas.

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Step 4
Now I´m adding the 2nd layer graphite to get deeper shades. I worked on the folds of the loincloth too and decided to give him a leather harness with ornaments (or whatever I wanna add later), because it´s sexy.

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Step 5
Now it´s time for Dirty Harry again: smoothing the 2nd layer and after that I´m using the rubbergum stick. I´m adding highlights to the shades. Now I can slowly think to get some more details on it. And I added jewelry on his arm. Cuz it´s sexy and another tiny detail that brings the drawing to live.

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Step 6
6. If I start with the details, I work from left to right and from up to down, because I´m right handed and would wipe the details away. (if you´re left handed you should work from right to left.)
So i started with the wings and feathers first. I completed the left half and got some shades into the hair and the face too.
[1.)] I worked a shade into a half of a feather.
[2.)] I added the structure with a fine mechanical pencil
[3.)] After that I added darker shades at the edges and on one side of the feather to make it more 3D.

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Step 7
7. When I have finished the feathers I added structure and shading to the hair. The trick in this is that i handle every streak as an 3D object - because they are, like everything - every fold, every single detail.

So when i´ve finished the details on the feathers, hair, I´ll add everywhere some shades, like pointed out in [1.)]
Even to give it depth where the hair reaches the head f.e. [2.)]
And now the steps for the leather belt iI "designed" on the fly.
[A.)] I start with erasing a border.
[B.)] framing it with a darker line
[C.)] erasing lines for that what will be some leather wraps or whatever it is called.
[D.)] framing the erased part with little boxes
[E.)] add some darker shadows do give it depth.

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Step 8
8. I finished the belts and the jewelry on the arm and added a few, smooth shades at the stomach/arm. for skin i don´t like use hard contrasts (only if it´s necessary.) And after that i finished the rest of the wing, because the work on the stomach is done.
later I´ll clean the stuff and finish the feathers. 
My time I used for this were several hours - I think round about 10. Such results don´t come with drawing half an hour on a sketch, I just notice that here -again. Doing the _boring_ shading routines is necessary, but takes time.

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Step 9
Now I designed the sword in the same way as the belts and added another layer of depth to the folds of the loincloth and smoothed it.

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I added more lightning (with an eraser pen) and a bunch more shadows on the folds and refined it I did the little part of the legs the same way. It´s finished now.
-click to enlarge-

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Here I dyed it in photoshop because I like sepiatones, but this is - of course, like the whole tutorial - my own opinion and taste. i added some clouds with photoshop, because I was too lazy to add a background.

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Hope you enjoyed the tutorial and found it useful.
Comments are all time welcome.

Cheers, Nathie