Art Practice - Expressions??

Following my recent efforts to improve my drawing and artistic skills, I've realised that one area I seem to consistently struggle with is drawing faces that fit.

While I think part of this comes down to getting to grips with drawing the body poses and trying to get the perspective right, which I'm still working on, I've recently realised that as I am likely an undiagnosed autistic person, and likely with ADHD, that I never really look at people's faces, and don't really know how to draw expressive faces as a result.  By this I mean that as much I can interact with people through masking, and I might be looking at someone's face, my brain isn't focussing on their face.  I don't look at the details of the face, and don't really notice facial expressions unless I force myself to try and figure it out.

Over the last few months where I have been doing the PenUp challenges I have been able to try drawing different people in different poses and scenarios, but one of the common issues is the face.  Comparing my current skill level with others who submit on the platform has been a bit of an eye opener as well.  While I still have plenty of room to improve, I've noticed from the challenges that my skill level is far from being a complete novice artistically.  I never used to try to draw people or parts of the body because I thought I could not get anything right about drawing people, but I've always drawn or done other artistic things on my own, just because I could, and because I wanted to.  Seeing the improvement in my drawings of bodies and poses over the last few months has been pretty encouraging.  While a lot of the effort has been trying to draw different poses and scenes, learning the different stages of making digital art has also helped me to improve, even if going through every step gets a little tiresome by the end.

While looking for practice sheets to help me try to draw the different facial expressions, even if it's only a few, I came across one the other day that arranged various expressions in a front facing grid.  Exactly the kind of image I wanted to use as a reference to be able to try and practice.

So in the last day or so I made a rough practice sheet of my own to be able to practice.  The head design in the sheet is pretty much just a copy of the heads on the reference, but not traced.  The practice sheet is below.

The idea is to use this template for multiple sessions of practicing the various expressions.  For the first session I tried to copy the different expressions as laid out in the reference.  As this is practice, the sketches are not overly complicated or detailed, and next time I will try drawing each expression 12 times over.

I understand that the idea of practicing drawing expressions sounds as simple a task as it comes, but for me to improve, this is what I need to do.

The first practice run is below.

Thanks for reading.