How to blend with colored pencils

I am constantly looking for drawing tips and several days ago I found this beautiful shading technique for colored pencils. If you follow the given link you'll find an example with the video presentation.

There are three shades of the same color - light, medium and dark - and the order of shading is as such: light, medium, light, dark, medium, light.

I obviously wanted to try this method to see what will happen. I decided to use my Snail again, redraw and shade it anew.

My first one was a complete fail, as you can see I didn't even finish it. I thought that the dark was too dark and that I wouldn't be able to blend it properly. Of course, I was wrong, but I decided to redraw it anyway. 

So this is the second try and I love it. The only thing I regret is not drawing some decoration on the sail's body so it would be even more gorgeous :).

And then I decided to draw some carrots. Looking at them now I don;t know wich one is better. While finishing the upper one I've noticed that because the dark one was too dark it didn't blend too well/I did the other one but in this case there was not enough of the dark and the carrot came out really flat.

So I might just keep on trying and use this technique because I simply love it :)