Johnny, My One and Only by @morna (Jessica Evans)
you can guess who it is I thinks ;) All done in photoshop from scratch, more practice with faces. I used a picture of him for reference. I prolly need to clean up the neck a little more and maybe add a few more highlights to the hair, but I'm satisfied with him enough right now to post him :) I tend to do better with people when I have reference photos :\ just somehing I have noticed...maybe one day I will be good enough I will not need reference photos dreamy sigh
You've got the features down right...you just need to sharpen them up. Add in more details; it's still smeary (esp. facial hair). The eyes are closer to what you want to aim for.
See, digital paintings have a tendency to want to be too blurry...so you have to work against it if you want to stand out in the realm of digital portraiture.
As far as learning to draw faces without references....First of all, find a model of a human skull (one that's not purposely scary/Halloween-feeling), and draw what you see in it, frome very angle you can.
Then, grab Gairy Faigin's "artist's guide to facial expressions" and Ron Tiner's "figure drawing without a model." Or even a Christopher Hart book on cartooning. ( Actually http://freetoon.com/ is by a better artist, and it's free!). Oh, and there's also the tutorials at www.anticz.com about drawing heads. Go there! :3
So, basically: keep doing what you're doing (drawing faces from references), and blend it with Knowledge of what you want to draw (reading portraiture books and the like), and also Knowledge of the 3Dness of faces (drawing from the skull).
It can be done! Keep up the nice work--you work hard on your pics, and it shows, and it'll help you a LOT in improving! :D