Great eyes. Very expressive, there is life to the face now. The heel of the jaw has been lifted to a more appropriate line with the mouth.
As it is, right now, as a work of its own, it’s beginning to look great.
What @lucasfalcao is implying, though, is on target. The face mesh you’re building is also a good baseline for other faces. Meaning it has room to be tweaked for a variety of looks. To do that though, will incur an understanding of the anatomy of the face.
The artist in the video he’s referencing discusses how bone structure in a face should be proportioned. I picked up some tips from it, just this morning.
All in all, very good look towards what could be a compelling study. Nice job.
As far as the hair, and skin, I think the real issue is your lighting. Its really hard to explain proper lighting because it depends a lot on the mood you are trying to achieve. As far as the overall style of the hair, its pretty nice. Perhaps you can ask giovanni to send you his head model I modified for him so you can see the hair and skin shader setup as well as the lighting setup.
The reference image you have is pretty accurate, and your texture doesn’t match it. In your eyes texture the scale of the veins are a lot thicker then on this image which probably makes them appear way to much, perhaps just making your veins a lot smaller with a maybe bigger texture resolution would be more appropriate. Also, the eyes appear yellowish a little too much. Which is accurate if she is a smoker or if she is old, but not if she isn’t (which in both cases I think she isn’t). Eyes are almost a pearl color usually. As far as the tutorial goes, the eyes do match the age of the person but still isn’t that realistic, you can tell its 3D just by looking at it, so it isn’t that realistic, its a good starting point which is made to show you the process of one person but by all means try to make a better one Tutorials are general guidelines and not set in stones and made to learn basics so you can build upon. You have to also do your own study on the matter so you will have a better understanding which will then stick. Study anatomy, study surface materials in the real world, how they interact with lights. Are they rough, smooth, in between, hard, soft, furry, fluffy, etc… Basing yourself solely on a tutorial wont make your artwork better, instead do a little study on the subject, dig it further, discover something new
Have not done any geometry changes, but did some texture work, and messed with the hair material, looking better i think. Mow i would like to get a good shader going for cycles (this is BI right now)… Is hair supported right now?
Really good work here. The only thing that I really focus on is the lipstick (not the lip geometry necessarily), specifically, it looks too pointed near the philtral dimple (the divot under her nose). It’s a minor thing really, but my eyes are drawn to it for some reason.
Alright so with all the new versions ob lender coming out and cool new features, i had to go back and try rendering Elara again.
This time is all Cycles with Strands for hair and SSS for skin.
Obviously still needing quite a bit of work. Any tips on SSS and Hair are much appreciated!
Something is wrong with the eyes, gotta go back and check it out…
Kept forgetting to move the eyes… finally did it…makes a huge difference.
Also widened the jaw a bit, and added a basic spec map.
Need a good bump/normal map, what is the best way about doing that? (Thinking of either trying to sculpt the skin pores with like a cloud texture brush, or maybe do that on a 50% gray texture… Not exactly sure how to go about this yet…
Seems like the skin needs more color variation, any hints here?
thanks for all your help
Tutorials are general guidelines and not set in stones and made to learn basics so you can build upon. You have to also do your own study on the matter so you will have a better understanding which will then stick. Study anatomy, study surface materials in the real world, how they interact with lights. Are they rough, smooth, in between, hard, soft, furry, fluffy, etc… Basing yourself solely on a tutorial wont make your artwork better, instead do a little study on the subject, dig it further, discover something new 
