Facing Failure

This face is from another blog that I follow that is absolutely amazing - Here. I wanted to try and draw the face alone - but made several mistakes.
First I drew this at the image's actual size. I ended up turning up the magnification of the entire drawing to 400% while I tried to free-hand this and realized that it was difficult to draw in any detail with a bunch of blocks. Because of this I turned to using some gray-scale colors to try and do shading which turned out poorly both because my tools are freebie tools and I really didn't know what I was doing or how to use them. Another issue I ran into is that I was really focused on the face and the features that stood out to me the most (such as the smile) which ended up becomming larger than the other features. I could have made the head itself larger to fit the face better and this would have made things more proportional, but by the time I came to that conclusion I had already woven in a lot of the shading and hair. The hair is weird - I would like to know how some real artists do this. Anyways - I want to make sure I post the good and bad alike!