Hello Laurel, thanks for your reply and encouragement! To paraphrase a famous politician "Being a portrait artist is hard work!"
Bill Whitaker says that it is at least as hard as being a concert pianist or a brain surgeon - those folks study for years and years...why shouldn't we be as serious about it?
What we do is often measured in millimeters which means you have got to be accurate - if the left eye is 1/16th of an inch too low or high, left or right, it is going to look wrong.
Hard enough to do just tracing or projecting and then rendering....drawing it all freehand...well...I think I will be still drawing from life 20 years from now and feel there is room for improvement.
I have the Bargue book and have done a skull in that style (thank you Bill Whitaker
). I want to do more and I actually have a space in my shop where I could do a wall mounted cast...how fun that would be!