Hey everyone I'm needing some help with shading the face. I can't seem to get the planes quite right and overall just feels like i'm not heading in the right direction with what i'm practicing.

I did a quick paint over as well as some construction over your head and creating a new one from scratch. You have an really stylized character but the forms of the head are a bit wonkey. I highly recommend getting Micheal Hampton Book There are other artist that break down the head but I personal have this book and it's easy to learn. What I did below was break things down step by step.

One thing I really enjoyed about your was the expression and the hair. Don't know if you were using reference or not but you should to find your mistakes a bit faster. Whenever you have a question about something you don't know, use reference. It's the best way to improve. Always try first with no reference to see how far you can go on your own then get reference to help you the rest of the way

Hope this helps clear things up and helped as well. Keep up the good work man. :+1:

Other than what @malcom already wrote, when your at the rendering stage, you could also try to start by blocking in the lights and shadows in a very defined way. Kind of like a cel-shaded style in comic books. I think it's a nice way to start defining the forms when you're starting to render.

I've made a rough example just to show what I mean. And you don't have to make the inked outlines. I just made that to make the drawing clearer.

From there you can just start softening the transitions and add some color variation as needed.

Hopefully this helps you. Keep drawing!

Colours are a world on their own. They are incredibly hard to learn if on top of it you're also learning the basics of drawing. My advice is to put down colours and learn to draw first. Then lean to exploit values and understand light, and only then step into colours.
Others might see it differently, but I believe that a beginner shouldn't tackle the most difficult area of Art first.