You're doing great. I have drawn 5 pears so far. I have learned something new each time.

I still see a lot of the tooth of the paper showing through. Try varying the use of the point of your pencils and the side. If you use the point it will help to fill in more of the tooth so that you will see less white specks of the paper and achieve a darker value.

 Hi jimm, I think you could try varying the pressure and see how that changes the tone. I did the exercise as well and found myself in the same situation as you. You can see in the top row of the first image that the tone doesn’t vary a lot. Not even from 4H to 4B (top right corner at least). However, I was only trying to achieve a flat tone and didn’t really concern myself with the tone range from one pencil type to the other. Now, even though the tones are similar, achieving them had a different feel depending on the pencil type. The feeling of the pencil on the paper was different (especially when comparing a 4H to a 4B). And I think that’s something the lesson was trying to convey. You can get similar levels of tone but where a 4H might ruin the paper in the process (because you have to apply a lot of pressure to get a darker tone) a 4B might require a much lighter touch to achieve that same tone. When I started experimenting with the pressure I got different extremes in tone based on the type of pencil (see crooked table in the second image). However, the tonal range of pencils does overlap. So the fact that you got similar results with a 4B and 6B is, I think, quite normal. I hope this makes sense. Good luck and have a great day!