yep, I love to color with markers as a base and then shade with colored pencils, but in this pic the background was really hard because shading only with colored pencils can be a pain with monotone and I only had one marker that could be used for coloring the background x.x
Yessss, building up color pencil is freakin hard, you can use an entire pencil like that! If you use a water color wash int eh background first, it is easier to color the entire thing with color pencil much more quickly!