Shading Reference and Tortillons

Here is a site that explains shading slightly better. Despite being a website claiming to help people to draw, it really has some surprisingly shit quality images on it.

This site claims that all you need to be an amazing artist is a 2B pencil and a tortillon.

Turns out that I have a tortillon already! It is a fancy-pants name for a blending stick.

The idea here is to shade from white to black across 10 boxes:

So here we go.

Then we take our tortilla stick and start to blend and blend in a circular motion...

So I guess that's slightly better, but I think it still looks a lot like pencil scratchings rather than a nice smooth shade.

The websites advice is to 'blend more'... so I did:

But to be honest, I don't think it looks much better. I'm going to try this again, but using different pencils for the different darknesses. Also I'm going to use more pencil when needed to make it look like one long thing, rather than a bunch of boxes.