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My advice has to do with the halftone and shadow shapes. They aren't as undefined as we often see them on cursory glance. We can usually draw a line around the difference between a light and medium tone, and between a medium and dark tone. Those lines of value changes, which are the places where the planes of the facial structure turn and capture different light effects, are quite a bit sharper than is usually perceived on first look. Try not to put a value into an area until you have defined that area -- don't just lay a stick of graphite or charcoal down and start shading "toward something" or working the same tonal area all along a curved surface, which is necessarily turned away from and entering into light in various degrees. Sure, of course, you can later go in and soften those contours and blend the value shapes together, but for some reason we often see in our mind's eye a much softer and more extended transition between those shapes than is offered to us in nature. The rather sharp demarcations are what give real "body" to our forms. Don't feel the need to round or smooth out everything. There are a lot of hard edges in nature. (There are even some lines in nature, but that's just between us.)
Steven
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