You are very welcome, I hope it helps!

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.

Oh geez, I'm not sure I have much for secrets, like I said, this was my first time and it was pretty much an experiment. What are the troubles you are facing exactly?

Thank you so much! This was my first time drawing with pencil crayons. A good friend of mine who has more experience gave me a few pointers which were very helpful for getting it started and the rest was just experimenting!