Small animal portraits

Here is a photograph of my most recent piece of artwork. It's a graphite pencil drawing of my new rat Treacle. It's about 5" x 7". I used a new pencil to draw it which is a mechanical pencil that takes a variety of different leads. The bonus of these types of pencils is the leads don't need to be sharpened, which means I keep a nice sharp point allowing for fine detail, without continually having to stop and sharpen the pencil. This particular type has leads available up to 2B which isn't really dark enough for the very dark areas of a drawing, but I was surprised at the depth of tone I got with it. I just used a wood-encased 4B pencil to darken up her eyes. I was quite pleased with the result and will definitely be using my mechanical pencil from now on.