Portrait study process and playing around with Photoshop brushes

Portrait study process and playing around with Photoshop brushes.  This is part of how to paint Susan Storm from Fantastic Four.  

This post is just a doodle of painting portrait using different Photoshop custom brushes to create the texture and mood that reflect those of oil paint.
Usually I would emphasis on starting out with BIG shape and strokes and get them all into the right shape or as close to what you want. Then we can begin to go in and refine them and clean up.
This one suppose to be just 30 mins to an hour speedpainting study, but I could make it in time so it is unfinished at the moment. I will have to work on it still one more sitting to clean up some area, define more edges, and little dark and light here and there then I think it should be complete.
A lot of you are asking me about custom brushes, what I usually emphasis is that really fancy brushes aren't that necessary if you don't know how values works. I would strongly recommend that FIRST you master the default Photoshop round hard and soft. Also know how to work with how much or strong paint you should apply onto the painting (or opacity strength), then you can think about custom brushes. Custom brushes are really useful, but you cannot rely on it all the time. Knowing the basic or the foundation is a lot more important in painting than using fancy brushes. To me the custom brushes are totally cosmetic and they can save us a lot of time, but it cannot replace the foundation of what you know and how you know to execute. Most good painting can be made with just default brushes if you know how. :)

Here are also some basic drawing people in general, body and face (portrait) lessons like these tutorials, they will direct you to a basic how to: How to draw lesson girl face, How to draw person head basic. And digital painting tutorial rogue samurai female. As for the face or head (women, female) Draw girl's face how to lesson video and step by step and learn how to draw face, woman. Enjoy the video tutorials.

Anyway here is a portrait I'm working on, still unfinished.

Here are step by step from sketch to painting

Here is what I have so far, still a bit more to work on.

Time: around 45 mins

Continue here for next step: Tutorial Portrait painting digital

-Draw and Paint Women Body Tutorial I
-Draw and Paint Women Body Tutorial II