Adorable! Great stylization :)

Nice studies! I like how they have a stylized feel but are still recognizable as the girls in the photos. I think you probably made the correct choice with where you drew the cheek in the second one initially. If you zoom into the reference, there is a dark cast shadow from the hair that lands on the cheekbone and makes it blend into the hair very quickly, but following the silhouette of her face from the bottom, you can see it actually keeps going further to the right as you go up.

Good job! I found this one pretty difficult.

Hey, I think you did a nice job simplifying your shapes. You're right that combining shapes will give you more options in your designs. Like your first rooster has a nice mix of triangles, squares and circles - you could try keeping the same variety in your Level 2 designs but just push one shape more heavily so that the overall impression is that of, say, a round character, with a big round silhouette, even though there might be some smaller triangles and squares within, instead of every single shape having to be a circle. Another thing I noticed is that even though you changed up the 3 basic shapes in your Level 2 designs, you kept the components of the faces the same size in each design. For example, with your hippos, most of them are roughly 2/3 eye window and 1/3 snout. You can change these proportions a lot, and try something more exaggerated like 1/5 eye window and 4/5 snout. Same goes for varying the size of the eyes, nostrils, etc. Also placement - you could place the ears on the sides, move the eyes down, etc. Re: lightweight paper, I haven't tried this with scans but when I take photos of thin paper and other drawings show through, an easy fix is to just place a few sheets of printer paper underneath the page you're taking a photo of. I imagine that could also work for scans?

Wow, these are so fun! I really love the one in the bottom middle of the first page. Something about him... Great exploration. This is a great way to improve. Keep it up!

Wonderful studies!

Really great studies! You captured a diverse range of faces and features! Overall, you found excellent areas to hone in on when constructing different face types. Subtle changes to the angle of the jaw and shape of the chin will yield dramatic differences in likeness. In Loomis's Drawing the Head and Hands he does cover a way to construct an average female head, but the rhythms and method of construction are nearly identical to male heads. His focus when drawing female heads is mainly on how to handle the subtle differences in the proportions of the underlying structure of the male and female skull, and how to use those differences to guide your portrait construction. Take a look at the 3D male and female skull models in the "Features" section and do a few studies from the front, side, and 3/4 views. Keep an eye out for proportional differences particularly in the jaw, chin, cheekbones, brow ridge, nose etc. In general, Loomis suggests softening the angular/broad features of the male head when approaching female portraits. So if you learn the blockier more angular male head construction as a base, you can use that as a framework to whittle it down and soften it until you reach your desired likeness for a female character. A more slender, rounded jaw line, pointier chin, smaller nose, with a slightly more slender, graceful neck width will quickly visually separate the female characters from the blockier male head/neck. Keep up the great work, the more studies you do the more you'll start to piece together how you like to show differences in your portrait construction methods. Hope this helps!