#ill tolerate crosshatching but i really cant stand stippling. so most of the time i also shade my inks like i'm using a pencil

[bitegore]

if you want to get better at smoothly shading in pencil without smudging your graphite (which to me just never looks very good unless you're really good at it, whereas carefully-layered light shading with a pencil rarely looks half as amateurish even when it is measurably less well-done so i'd imagine it also looks that way to some others) the best advice i have is to use a ballpoint pen, like a normal office pen that you can get some gradation out of because the ink doesn't flow- don't use one of those fancy wet ink bic ones or whatever, and use it like it's your pencil for a few weeks and then come back to see what kind of control you have over your pencil lines, darkness, coverage, etc after. i was working with a mediocre ballpoint earlier (didn't want to ruin my good inks on the gritty as hell watercolors i use) and was reminded of how fast my ability to shade in pencil picked up when i ran out of pencils to doodle with during part of my sophomore year in high school and started doing ballpoint drawings the same way i did my pencil ones