This is just my two cents, and I could very well be wrong, but the scratchy/sharp stroke effect might have to do with the processing power of your device. When I would run Photoshop on my old laptop, it did every sort of shenanigans since the software simply stretched it too thin. Color banding, brush lag, things like that.
I feel you, procreate for my money has the best smudging I have ever tried. I think tue trick is to use large to small brushes ehen blending with alt clicking and if using the smudge tool you have to modify - customize the brush a lot to make it work how you want
14 days later
Ugh! I'm horrified by this! I really did try my best too. 
I've been getting busier and busier lately. It's hard to find the time to practice art. I'm on Week 3 of Term 2 right now, but I don't think I'll be able to practice all my current assignments in a mere week. I will need a lot more time to practice drawing the head and all of its different features.
Keep at it and take your time
Don’t rush
Yes! I went through that same pain haha, trust me it gets better the more you know and the more you practice and fail. You can actually see a bit of my progress and you can see how ugly some of my heads were. now at least they are decent.
Keep going!
nothing to be horrified by on this, the proportions and placement of all the features are roughly correct, and that's something lots of people struggle with
I'm pretty sure I have yet to see anyone sticking strictly to the schedule, I see it as more of guidelines to help stay focused and on track.
Also not everyone can dedicate the same amount of time to this, so in the end is best to make your own Schedule, based on the course or based on your goals and time that you have
16 days later
Still on Week 3 of Term 2. I've just completed the portrait study assignment. I'm not impressed with my shading, but I hope in time I will get better at this technique. I am aware about the advantages of using "the full range of values," but I didn't implement that in this assignment very well.
But guess what? My proportions seem correct at least! I feel like I'm getting better at this!
The last assignment for Week 3 was to draw 5 character heads from imagination. I was able to finish 4, and I believe I've improved a little! I did realize, by the end of this, I'm going to have to study even more human heads from real photos.
It's tough, but you're doing an alright job at it. I feel learning the skull and the planes of the head help a ton, getting different viewpoints from various artists also helps to further your understanding of what's important
Proportions look alright overall, where I feel you may be having more difficulty is in the 3D form of the head and its features. When in doubt, try making contour lines either horizontally or vertically. For example, a vertical contour of the midline when you compare to a profile view can help you see if your features are in the right perspective, and horizontal ones help a lot with things like the eyes. It happens all too often, we focus on getting the details well drawn but don't realize that we have two or three perspectives in one portrait
As an example, on the last head, try drawing entirely the ellipse of the brow line through the skull sphere, note the eyes are kind of on a horizontal rather than wrapping around the sphere and placed accordingly, the lids have no thickness/overlap and the nose is facing us while showing a side plane at the same time
There's nothing wrong with re-iterating the same face and angle or erasing/fixing the same one to further enforce what you're learning. I struggled a lot at first and I still feel I need to learn a lot more before my heads are any good from imagination X_X
cheers!
As @snakker said, my best piece of feedback is regarding ellipses and the 3D mindset. The ellipse doesn't hit the edge of the sphere on a straight angle, but wraps around it (Save from the orthographic front view).
I suck at words so i did i little example to illustrate what i meant.
I remember that i did hundreds of circles with ellipses inside on the very beginning of the course, and to this day i still struggle to make a "perfect" circle, nothing that my old friend Ctrl + Z doesn't fix tho lol
Something I struggle with, no matter how much I practice, are those basic 3D spheres. Whenever I try to draw them, I get a flat circle with a flower pattern slapped on. Despite undoing and redrawing, it never comes out right. I end up moving on and later wonder why everything looks wrong.
I already started the next week's assignments on more perspective stuff, but it seems I am still not ready to proceed as I am completely missing some basic 3D skills that I'm probably going to end up needing for the 3-point, 4-point, and 5-point (good gracious, does it ever stop?!) perspective drawings. I'm gonna go back and get this MASTERED before moving on.
Thanks for the help, @Pattu_w and @snakker! Back to the grind now...
So here's what's been happening lately. I have this notebook that I use for both school and for writing other important stuff down. I just opened that, and for these past few days, I've just been drawing circles with those contour lines that give the circle the appearance of a sphere. I've filled pages with these drawings now. Up until now, they've been looking a lot better, and I think I understand them now. Today, I decided to test myself and create an animation of a rotating sphere.
I think I will continue to use this and try to build the face and the facial features--using basic shapes (e.g. a simple rectangular block for the nose)--on each frame. So far, does this look correct or do I need to keep practicing the 3D sphere more?
The animation was done in Clip Studio Paint. I tried Photoshop's animation feature and I didn't really like it.
Hell yeah, this looks awesome! It looks like you got it, always good practice to keep doing these from time to time but i feel like those can be done along side your other studies
To my eyes there's no need to 100% master all of those concepts to keep moving forward, but do keep them in mind. Really great job on those tho!
Great job on the sphere!
EYYY this animation looks great! and yea photoshop's animation capabilities are meh and onion screen is hard to use. which is why i got CSP cus otherwise i'd draw in photoshop and animate in krita and i wanted it all in one place tho krita's pretty awesome for being free!
I've got a lot of practice and hard work to do when it comes to perspective, but here's how it's looking for right now. Hopefully one day I can look back at these drawings and know that I'm a thousand times better at perspective then ever before.
I'm a little bit discouraged at how long I've been doing art and how quickly I'm being humbled right now...but...I WON'T give up!
these look really good! esp that 2nd one which has a good sense of depth
That's a cool ethereal feel you gave that last one like the castle is a part of a dream, that smooth brush stroking following the vanishing point really helps sell it and being able to see the top of the wall clearly illustrates we are right above it and gives it a solid feel. the less detailed back wall also adds depth
cheers!
1 month later
From here on out, my drawings are going to be more simple--maybe excluding human drawings and studies. My time has been cut short as I recently started a full-time job. This, however, does not mean that my simple drawings will have less effort worked into them. I will always put in my best.
For example, this drawing would have looked a lot more believable had I added some windows to the wall, maybe if I gave the ground some grassy texture, or had I not rushed the cliff underneath the bridges (there were supposed to be two, but I guess it looks like one with a gap in the center), but I decided to just go ahead and stop at this final version. I still get the idea behind 4 point perspective.
I gotta figure out spheres in perspective...
