/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

The human body is so hard compared to still objects, the body itself isn't bad, even fingers or hands or feet, but faces? I struggle with them. This must be a case of what they call symbol drawing as well as a fundamental misunderstanding of the human face and how it looks.

I didn't attempt for this to be cartoonish or animelike at first, I wanted this to be realistic, but as I continued I slowly realized I have no idea what a face looks like, what details that make a face a face besides vague shape. Loomis said that a skull can be approximated with a sphere and a flat plane, and the book states that I should practice from different angles, that's fine, but given my problem is so severe that my faces look like this, should I do reference drawings or follow loomis at first? Or something else?