Pencil Portrait-Man with a Cat-Part 1

This is what i am working right now at the moment. It is a commissioned work. The person who commissioned it wanted me to draw himself holding his cat that passed away after long 16 years, last week.
I have dome almost half of the drawing so i will make this a part 1, and when i will finish it completely i will post the final piece.

Here i have some process photos:

In the picture the person is holding his cat in front of him, and the cat is covering his face. As you can see in the pictures, leaving uncovered just less than half of the face.
Usually when i am drawing any portrait, i start with one eye but i never finish it. I do around 50 % of the eye, and then i start to draw another one. After that i return to the first one. I do that because its easier for me to see how the drawing is developing, and it is easier to make both eyes the same. I don't like to rush things, not in my daily life and certainly not in my drawings.

When i started to draw the persons hair i used 3H pencil. The hair originally looks dark, so i could start with 2B from the beginning, but thats not what i would like to do. Because if i do that, than i would have dark hair, but they wont have that realistic look that you will see in the next pictures. That is one technique that i use to make hair look realistic. Of course it takes more time and it would be easier to use just one pencil but i better prefer to work a little bit longer and have better result.


After i finished drawing basic core with 3H pencil, i started to work with 2B. As you can see i made some strong strokes with it to make those black strands of hair.


After around 3 hours of working with 2B i got to the result that you can in this last picture. It is almost finished.I will need to do some work with an eraser. It will take me about 30 minutes. That i will include in the second part, because i have not done that yet. It took me around 7 hours to draw this far.

I will include a link to my verification post, that all of the drawings posted here are done by me: @edgarsart/edgarsart-original-art-now-verified
More of my art you can find on my twitter page: https://twitter.com/EdArtDrawings