I have gone back to my Udemy drawing course this past week, and am reviewing the lessons about individual facial features and how they fit together, etc. So far I am having better luck with the individual features than with having they synergize into a non-creepy face, but that's what practice is for. I know that I can draw faces that look all right, as long as I don't get too hung up on details. However, the instructor has a particular method he's teaching, and I figure I should at least practice that a little bit, see if I can't get more photorealism in my faces. 

Earlier in the week, I drew this sketchbook page along with the lesson:

A day or so ago I saw someone on facebook who had embarked on drawing 100 realistic noses. He was just finding them on google images and stuff! I thought that was a great exercise, but that maybe 100 of them was more than I had patience for. Here are the 15 I drew this evening:

These are obviously all front view. Later I will do a bunch of side view noses and some 3/4 view, etc. 

I like how this exercise came out. They aren't all perfect; they aren't even all particularly recognizable as the noses from the photo references, although I think I did pretty well in that regard, given my inexperience; However, they are all different from one another in ways that would make them easy to distinguish between if, for example, they were on characters in a graphic novel. Some of them point more forward than downward, some more downward than forward; some of them are straight, some bent, some downright twisted; some of them are narrow, some round, some very articulated and some very soft. 

There's always room for more practice, of course. Ars longa, vita breve, right? Or, I guess as a medieval literature guy I should use Chaucer's rendition: "the lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne..."