Another thing I learned working on these was the necessity of working with a brush that I like. It sounds like a no-brainer, but I didn’t realize how much I was subconsciously fighting with the results just because of my brush choice. (In general, sadly, I’m very bad with awareness of my brushes. I’m always very impressed when people in the chats ask and know what brushes they use.) I’m not sure if I’ve found my comfort brush yet, but since then I have taken the time to at least explore and compare.
So at this point, I started fiddling with other brush options. Between that and the accumulating practice, it felt like the portraits were coming out a little easier.
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And here are the portraits from the 2nd week of back to back practice. On some of these, I tried experimenting with some shading. Overall though, since I still felt a little ungrounded in my brush choices, I skipped the shading and tried to make it read well enough in the line art.
My thought process here was I wanted to hone in the basic portrait anatomy and proportions, more than a finished product. In hindsight, I guess I still could have kept the ‘clean line’ look if I did a little hatching in place of the shading brush. 
Not to mention line weight. Well! More options for further practice and learning! 
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I had settled on the no shading opt for this guy, but I’m including a couple of variants I did at the time of trying a different shading brush. (The difference between the two is very subtle - literally just one extra layer on the righthand one)
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Wow! These are really great
I really like the way your shading turned out. Hatching would have looked good as well, but I think they turned out very nice
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Thanks so much! I should definitely practice with hatching some time. 
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So! Still in the summer of 2025, this next run was a practice on eyes. 
For all but one set, I have a base/draft version and a final version.
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Then, at the end of summer 2025, I did a run (with the same fellow artists) on poses. After portraits, poses seemed the next basic ‘people’ thing to tackle 
. Did about one per day for two weeks. These are my first three.
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