first things first, I like the plane shading on the sides! This is a really nice start. Immediately, what clocks is the difference in value contrast. Darker skin tends to have very bright highlights (I’m sure someone else can explain why), and here the lights aren’t light enough and the darks aren’t dark enough. I think you picked up on this and made the whole drawing more desaturated and darker, but what you had originally was a fine mid tone! I wanna state here that I lowkey don’t care about the body or how accurate the face looks to the photo, so I didn’t change any proportions. Having accurate proportions comes with time and isn’t something u can teach. If you want a critique on that, you can try overlaying the reference over your drawing at low opacity and see where it changes I learned using the asaro head, but there are a few other methods like loomis or reilly. The planes help with shading because you can predict how solid surfaces interact with light. You know how to shade a sphere, try shading a rectangular prism on top of it! Or even another, smaller sphere carved into it. the planes r pretty easy to remember, especially because we as people happen to LOOK at people a lot, which makes it super easy to tell when something is wrong.
