Pencil Portrait of Duckie

I have to be perfectly honest, I had no idea who this was when I started and finished the portrait. I just saw the reference picture online and it looked pretty good and I thought it would be great to try bringing out the details on paper. I only found out it was actually someone fairly popular after I tweeted it, lol, which isn't to say I'm not proud of it.
I almost got discouraged about halfway through though when I was told by a fellow artist that I was doing it all wrong, criticism is really sometimes hard to take. I would've dropped it there and then but I have a few abandoned works and I was reluctant to add to the pile.
Completing this has made me realise that I'm still learning, I can't get each work done perfectly every time but I do learn from my mistakes, a lesson I hope will reflect in my next piece.

For this piece, I had to go really dark with the tones, so I used both graphite and charcoal pencils. My current brand of graphite is Derwent, charcoal is Generals. The paper is 8x12inches Strathmore 300 Bristol, 270gsm stock. I had to use a White Uniposca Marker for the highlights and a soft brush for the blending. I find that blending with a soft brush is better when applying charcoal and graphite together as opposed to the cotton bud I normally use, cos the bud tends to lift the graphite and charcoal from the paper. I also used a Tombow mono zero eraser, both the circular and rectangular shaped ones. I like the rectangular one cos it makes nice strands of hair, I mostly use the round one for skin highlights.