Child of The City

age: 16
this is a graphite practice drawing that I've been working on over the past few weeks. I was really hoping to improve my technique with skin and hair, and I think I did a decent job (but in terms of how close it looks to the reference there are soooooo many things i could have done better. I think I just got lazy and sloppy towards the end and missed a whole bunch of details; some mistakes are more obvious than others). for those of you who have been following my work, I think it's obvious that this is the first realistic drawing I've done in a long time; I think a good explanation as to that would be because I've lost interest in realistic work. I've found that art to me has more meaning in an expressive, out of the ordinary piece of artwork rather than a photorealistic artwork (especially if the photo used is unoriginal, like with this drawing), where every drawing of a particular photo looks the same; the artist has no real style or any kind of personal touch which differentiates it from another artist's work. That's why I've been doing a lot of surrealism lately, to try to individualize myself from others. Although I think I've been doing a decent job at that, I feel it's time to take it to the next level. But before I do that, I thought that I'd share this practice drawing with those of you who are interested. This will be the last realistic work (other than some other commissions that I'm currently working on) before a series of new, more expressive works that I plan to do.
PS. Sorry for the bad quality picture. I didn't feel like scanning this today, and I only had one camera available, since my phone was acting weird, and unfortunately it is the worst camera for taking detailed photos of my artwork. Nevertheless, you can still see about 60% of the details, so it isn't too bad, i hope.
Reference: [link]