You've already gotten great critiques, so I'll just say... that is a VERY unusually rough bristol. Who makes it, out of curiosity? For the future, look for "smooth" or "plate" bristol, smooth being... smooth, and plate generally being extra smooth.

One thing I would recommend is to REALLY focus on those mannequin skills. Every artist does mannequins a little differently (some artists have more than one mannequin they use) so don't get hung up on any one system, just pick something simple to start with (Proko's robo-bean + cylinder limbs is a great start) and carefully invent poses, focusing on rock solid clean lines and perspective (sloppy drawing will really hold your mannequins back). Over time it becomes easier to visualize things, and you'll learn lots of bone-stock generic poses that work well which you can modify (the "Masters of Anatomy" books are pretty good references for go-to poses, but make sure you're constructing a mannequin instead of just copying his roughs). Secondly, to echo nnnnnnnadie's comment - get into those poses. When you imagine one, if you get into the pose, you'll quickly realize if it's awkward or impossible. Once you can find a pose that actually feels natural you can snap a photo and draw a mannequin. Eventually you'll want to work from gesture > mannequin > drawing, or even straight to a pose Kim Jung Gi or Stan Lee style. If you struggle with getting your mannequins in perspective, just work on simple solids like cubes and cylinders until you're fairly comfortable. Also... if you get stuck, fire up Daz or Magic Poser or something and just pose away. It's best for learning if you can work out the mannequin yourself, but if something keeps coming out wonky - no rules, only tools. Knock it out and try to get it from imagination next time.

When you work from life (which seems common among the Russian Academic folks), you have the advantage of all of the dynamic sensitivity of the human eye, which can see detail in the light and dark parts of a model that the camera really struggles with. Feel free you give yourself the same advantage! If you have access to Photoshop (or any of the free alternatives, which have the same basic tools) just create a copy of the image with the exposure turned way up (so you can get more details from the darks), way down (so you can get more detail from the lights), or the contrast boosted (so that you can see subtle details easier). Optimally, if you were shooting your own reference, you'd take multiple photos with different exposures, but even with an existing image this can help a lot. Also, very "academic" approaches to drawing tend to emphasize REALLY taking your time and nailing your measurements, and then slowly building up values, very carefully (as opposed to a more "illustration" approach where you might do a drawing like this in 3 hours total). Stephen Bauman's Patreon (or he has a course on Proko.com) is one of the most accessible resources for this kind of drawing. He's not exactly a Russian Academic guy, but he does lean very far to the academic side of things (while maintaining a "not QUITE so mind numbingly rigorous" approach). The best way to nail that supernaturally pristine academic drawing look is to take your sweet time and follow the a rock solid method.

I heard something from Patrick J Jones the other day, paraphrasing Steve Huston. Now I'm paraphrasing him: "We had a small win - we didn't get stressed, we didn't burn out. We did a small, simple drawing, and it felt good." Try to go into your gestures with this mindset. It doesn't have to be "right" - and it probably won't. Everyone who has ever done gestures has probably done hundreds of bad ones, so every time you do one and it isn't as good as you wanted it to be - pat yourself on the back. You just knocked out one of those bad ones, and that bad drawing was going to come out of you at some point, whether you stressed or not; whether you are an absolute pro, or a brand new beginner. That's one less bad gesture you have ahead of you. Some day when you're amazingly good, you're still gonna have bad drawings now and again - but not many, because you're putting most of them behind you now. Art is one of those rare things where you truly fail your way to success. As long as you keep drawing, keep learning, and take feedback, every drawing (bad or good) is part of the path. This mindset helps me avoid feeling anxious about doing something I find difficult in art, and helps me feel good when I do a bad drawing. Don't go into the gestures (or any drawing) with the mindset that you need to nail it, just go into it with the mindset that, today, you're going to take some steps on the path. Every step on the path is inevitable, and there is no end to the path because you'll be learning all your life - so relax and enjoy the walk. Second - echoing Conner's advice here - stop worrying about the time so much. It's ok to turn it off. If you find that turning it off makes you take drastically too long (20 minutes for a simple gesture etc.) then just double or triple the recommended time. The MAIN reason why gestures are kept short is to force yourself to keep it simple and not get caught up in detail - as long as you're trying to do that, the timer is just a helper, not a requirement. Finally, paraphrasing Jeff Watts here, there's absolutely no reason to just start throwing down lines like crazy when the drawing starts. Even on very short, time limited drawings, sometimes it's best to pause and take 10-30 seconds to just look at the reference and think about it a bit. Are any of the pieces of anatomy directly in a convenient line with anything else? Is there a big S or C curve you can see that will be an easy starting point? If I could make this pose only two big lines, which would I choose? etc.

For anything you're keeping cartoony like this, line confidence is critical - it's ok if there are some searching lines on your draft, but you really want to be definitive on your final linework, avoiding any scratchy ghost lines. Additionally, you want to use your line weight carefully to ensure the drawing reads well even before you put colors on. For instance - see how there's a tiny line of shadow where the hat wraps around her forehead? Using a very thin, ghosted line there gives us the impression that there is no overhang - i.e. this is a thin, flimsy cloth, or possibly even blonde hair. A bold line weight here would give the impression that there is a bit of an overhang where the hat folds over, and make it clear that the hat is something she's wearing, not part of her body. The same is true at the bottom of the shirt, the thin line gives the impression of "sticking" to her body in the drawing, where we can see there is an overhang in the photo. A bold line here would give the impression of a "drop shadow" and help create some distance there.

These are overall good, but there are parts of them that stand out as especially strong (as an example, I think there's an absolutely great sense of depth and volume in the bent knee in the crouched pose marked "2"). Additionally, I feel that you've got an undergirding sense of gesture supporting your structural forms (5 for instance is a standout in terms of capturing the motion of the pose). My impression is that you're in a bit of a growth stage with these, leveling up a bit (just my guess based on how well executed some of the elements are in comparison to some of the others, which are competent but not quite as strong), so definitely keep grinding them out and trying to bring everything up to the same level. In terms of constructive critique, there are some proportional issues (the stretched cranium in 7, the shrunken cranial mass in 3, and the too-long humerus in 1, for instance). This is a natural stage of learning but make sure you're catching these by measuring when you go back and self-critique your quicker drawings, while also being extra careful to slow down and "get it right the first time" on your slower, more carefully considered drawings. I would recommend trying to be a bit neater with these, even if you have to slow down or draw them much bigger to achieve it. On the other hand, a lot of your wrapping lines really do feel like they're going all the way around the form, which is great. As a final constructive note, I see that you're thinking about anatomy a bit with these, but there are some inaccuracies that you don't want to become habits - the ridge muscles in drawing 2 seem to originate much too far up the humerus, and the deltoid group does not feel like it's inserting in the humerus in your drawing. I hope this helps!

Your structure is not quite there - the eyelids are thin, and the brow structure is too low. It’s a very pretty drawing, but make sure that you’re focusing on tidiness and volume over rendering. I like to think of brows as a big curved polygon, almost like lips, just like you’ve done here. Keep it very neat and make sure it is a coherent shape in perspective. You’re also on the right tack with “clumping” groups of lashes, but vary the lengths, make them longer towards the outer corner of the eye, and use some line weight to make them thicker at the base. When practicing, using a very rudimentary rendering style can be helpful to understand the form, while still being fast enough that you get a lot of repetition. Drawing 6 fairly clean 10 minute eyes in an hour is a lot more valuable in terms of learning structure than 1 hour long prettily rendered eye.

Looking at this and your other posts, I think it’d be valuable at this stage in your development to focus deeply on structure. These that you’ve posted are superficially different body types, but they are very flat, and I don’t think they will be as useful to you as they would be if you had drawn them with a focus on structure. Any mannequin structure is fine, but a super duper simple cube and cylinder structure is going to help tremendously to begin to think about the human body in terms of volume. If you struggle to draw structure, wrapping complex anatomy around that structure is going to be very challenging. Additionally, I would try to place about an equal focus on neatness. Your goal at this stage should be to make coherent, carefully considered drawings - they don’t need to be flawless but they need to be clear. One of the best ways to learn to draw cleanly as an early student is to get a big pad of newsprint and draw big, using the whole arm. It’s good to start learning a bit about line weight and how you can use it to emphasize overlaps and so on, but primarily just try to be tidy. The smaller you draw, the harder this will be - drawing a full figure or a complicated construction on a 5x7 moleskine page is going to be very difficult. As an exercise, I like to draw just piles of tumbling cubes. You can vary the sizes, or even the amount of perspective distortion between them. You can overlap them and try to use line weight to make it clear which is behind which. They don’t have to be perfect proportional cubes for this exercise to be valuable, but you should try to approximate 3 point perspective for each cube. When you don’t know what to draw this is a great “filler” exercise to help yourself get a sense of rough perspective and space, and to train your brain to focus on being tidy, but not ruler strict. Edit: To tie this back into your Proko studies, once you’re semi comfortable with a very generic cube mannequin, you can begin to distort and design those volumes a little bit to make them more organic, as in the “robo-bean” construction, which combines volume with a little bit of gestural thinking.