No, not initially. Start off light with everything, get the "skeleton" of the picture lightly shaded in and do the lights placed in the right places first since you can't really put light over dark with the pencils. Then slowly start layering in the different shades and building the darks up. I didn't do any blending with this one but I know some people will start the dark areas with blending in the darker areas and then adding the actual hair strokes in later but I can't speak to that as it wasn't what I did. All the drawing was done with the direction and texture of the hair in mind.