Muzzbook

[Finnjamin]

Glad to see you're still kicking, Muzz. Regarding your current study of faces here's something I quickly cut out of what I'm working on;




You're rendering fine, but your works are still wanting, this means your brush control is great, but your thinking about it will have to develop next.

Colours, I recently found that the solution is also the simplest, take the ambient colour of your image and blend towards a strong flesh tone, add in almost transparent dabs of bright colour depending on what's relevant to the facial area.
For cheeks, and nostrils, red.
Lips, eyelids, and nose tip, are purple.
Shadows will be close to the ambient background colour.

And again, pressure-controlled opacity is your friend. You can be as subdued or bombastic as you like, but the answer for colours is always between the [ambient background colour] and the [strong accurate colour].

Textures. Faces are rough, and your colour choices aren't strong enough and your lines are too lazily defined for me to assume that you're going for the smooth stylized look. So you should paint faces as rough, flexible surfaces. This means patterns of texture and smoothness according to light and the angle of the surface.
Get a sort of dot-scattering brush, give it roundness jitter and pressure-control opacity, use that to perform the major light-shadow blends, depending on face type and (again) angle you can employ a simple brush to scratch some elongated lines in the nose, as pores there might have oddly linear shadows and highlights.

I realize Muzz that I may have over-explained this for you personally, I only did so for posterity.

Finnjamin out.