A little more graphite blended onto the hand and here is the progress on the drawing. It will still need some refining before the decision is made about the background. There has always been debates on how my backgrounds should be handled. Many of my peers think that it should be left blank to add to the effect of the hand coming off of the page. I have always opted to put the background in. After looking back through my blog, it is obvious where this technique has been successful. It is equally obvious (to me anyways) on a few compositions where a background left out might have been a slight improvement. I guess that I am just not sold on celestial free floating objects. It seems that I need to ground my drawings to the world that they are associated with. :)