I primarily want to thank you for taking the time to teaching us. You are an awesome instructor with so much knowledge combined with a great personality! There is so much to get better at as a complete beginner! So many opportunities to learn it is very exciting! Just learning to control the pencil is so interesting. If you have time I leave some thoughts here: If you had your own school, when would you introduce if at all more knowledge? Like you said I thought about where I would like to see myself, and what speaks to me most is the imaginative realism of scenes like your western paintings or works of past masters like Repin for example. What trajectory would you suggest for students who are self educating? Personally I would do a lot more drawings like these taking lots of time and do self critiques on them... For example the right eye here is really whack... I want to avoid becoming too "enslaved" to my reference but also to avoid the pitfalls you so clearly outlined about letting "knowledge" lead to formulaic drawing. I have seen Head Layins with a more three dimensional approach and wonder about their place in the big picture..

can i get the same photo to download? if poaaible