A Head of the Game

You love those corny post titles don't you?  Here's hoping I'm a head and face master before I run out of idioms involving those words.  Anyway, it's been a while since I posted an practice sheets, which is mostly because I haven't done as much as I should.  I have been drawing heads for the past few weeks though, and for the most part the (relatively) good outweigh the terrible.  These have mostly been slower pieces - I think I can get faster once I know how things hold together and I can nail the proportions more often than not, so right now I'm taking my time (5 to 20 minutes), and making a vague effort to get things more or less right.  OK, let's look at the good stuff first.

Good 
There, not too terrible right? I mean I'm no comicbook genius, but they're at least recognisably human yes? Good. Half of these were drawn based on photographs, the other half were off the top of my head; From photos were the ladies in the corners, and the girl with a necklace.  Where are the men I based on photos?  Why, they all ended up in the bad for some reason.  Quite odd since I'm usually better at drawing men than women (well, attractive women anyway, ugly mutants are easy).  The girl in the middle at the bottom isn't all that great really, but she reminds me of something Jack Kirby might have drawn for some reason, and that makes it awesome.  Speaking of Kirby, that guy center top looks like the lovechild of the Hulk and the guy who played John Henry in the Sarah Connor Chronicles.  Tremendously ugly, but I still think it's pretty good, so there.

Bad
Dear heavens what have I done? It's ghastly! Is the guy in the upper left supposed to be Harrison Ford or Arnold Schwarzenegger (Sadly it's based on Harrison - terrible right? I will atone soon)?  Why is the man below him wearing such an ill proportioned hat?  What in Gods name did I do to those poor women's faces?  It's not all bad though, Scott Bakula lookalike in the upper right looks OK, except for the black eye, and the lower left hand head is pretty good if you overlook his going out pretending to be the Joker (Look at that mouth! Oh gracious me).

Overall there was more good stuff than bad, and I can see I need to do a fair bit of work on mouths noses and eyes individually (most especially to get the concavity of them right).  I also need to do some drawings that demonstrate the planes of the head to assist with lighting, and start really cracking on the anatomy of the neck and shoulders.  I'll get to hands one day; when I think my head will explode.  Until then I'll still be using lots of reference. for them.