How to paint people, portraits, and faces

Here is the update of my "dirty olive martini party" picture. Based on whether you like what you see or not, you can either take my thoughts on how to paint people or, well, you can not take them! Painting faces can be really challenging because to do so realistically (this doesn't really apply if you are going for abstract or some other styles), you need to paint what you SEE and not what you THINK you SHOULD see when you look at a face. That is, if you conjure up in your brain the idea of what an eye should look like, it is probably a football shaped object with a ball of color for the iris and another ball of black in the middle of that. Now, look in the mirror or at a picture and look at someone's eye. Really look at it and see the shapes and angles and shadows and how your eye blends into the surrounding skin (not like the solid black outline of the football you pictured or that you commonly see in children's drawings of faces). The same is true for the nose and all the other facial features. You don't paint lines to make a nose, you paint shadows and highlights and this creates the impression of a nose. Also note that the nose isn't necessarily where you think it should be - that is in the middle of the face. Unless the person you are painting is looking dead-forward, the nose is likely to be off to one side a bit. Again, the same holds true for the positioning of the other features. Another tip - most of us (myself included) - tend to underestimate the size of the forehead. Look at yourself in the mirror and observe objectively how much real estate on your face is being devoted to the forehead - a LOT, right? My personal opinion is that we underestimate or "don't see" how big the forehead is because foreheads are just plain boring - instead, we spend a lot more time looking at people's eyes, noses, and mouths, the humble forehead just gets subconsciously "cropped" out by our brains.
I am struggling to follow these rules as I continue on with this painting. A really good book on this subject is called "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards. In fact, I might go grab it off the bookshelf and refresh my memory - so I can give you all the lowdown in another post.