Beginner looking for critique/paintover Update.1

[Chicken]

Heya, Some quick thoughts and tips for you.

1.  Speed comes as a result of a large amount of practice in the fundamentals. You simply CANNOT shortcut this. Forget about speed as an outcome for now, and focus on your fundamental skills. You'll thank yourself later for doing this.

2. Structural and value accuracy.  
You need to work on prioritising these first before you get all excited about learning to finish a coloured render in two hours. You seem to be able to fairly accurately copy colour work but your lack of structural fundamentals clearly are bringing this all down.

One example of what I mean is doing a structural line drawing before painting where you nail accurate proportions, planes of the face etc before you paint a stroke.


Resources
http://www.dorian-iten.com/accuracy/
But get everything on his site, watch them and start to apply to your approach. I believe most of it is pay what you want (0+)
drawabox.com  Do all the exercises on that site. They focus on fundamentals
Find any book by Andrew Loomis, they all contain good information. Read and make any studies from those as you work through them.

For faces specifically, google Asaro heads and do studies of those, learn the major planes of the head. Figures and anatomy will need even more focus as you develop.




3. Study purpose?  These studies seem to be you attempting to simply copy what you see rather than focus on a very specific aspect of the image that you wish to analyse and learn from. That's fine, but it will be more efficient to focus on some specific things you want to learn from each study and then most importantly APPLY to something you do yourself that isn't a study.

Watch this. It's a breakdown of the above idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kfK46nruKM

Slow and steady wins the race. Don't get ahead of yourself too much, and I sense you might be heading that way.
Good luck!



Thanks for your imput, greatly appreciated