STEP ONE: BASIC FACE

Open a new document. My size defaults at 792x612. This is fine. If you are going to use the final image as a reference(highly recommended), place it now as mentioned earlier. Be sure to lock this layer. The original will be larger than the documents printing size. This is okay since it is easier to work with a big image, and besides, we aren't printing (I hope). Zoom to a level where the entire artwork is on the screen and as big as your workspace allows.

Let us first look at the style of art. Take notice:

1) Tone: -There is a limited number of colors,(Perfect for Vector) -Her face is composed of 3 main color tones: the Midtone, Shadow, and Highlight.

2) Lines: The strokes of the lines are very stylized.(This is why we'll use the artistic brushes for most of our strokes)

I used most of the strokes from the Illustrator 9 Artistic Sample Brushes. You can find them in (Window-Brush Libraries-Artistic Sample). Keep them closeby. If, for some reason you don't have them, get them here.

Draw the head

Make sure you name your first drawing layer. We will call it "Facial Lines". Let us first draw the shape of the head. I used the pencil tool (you can use the pen tool if you prefer),with the fountain pen brush, and a 1px stroke, no fill.

Start from the left side and work around upwards till you complete the path. The fountain pen starts thick and ends thin, just what need.

Eyes and eyebrows

Next we will add in the eyes and eyebrows with the pencil tool (or pen, of course). EYEBROWS (Fountain Pen Brush, 1px stroke, no fill).
EYES (Pencil Brush, 1px stroke, no fill). Use several pencil strokes for the eyes to give it that sketched look.

Now let her have some darling eyelashes. I used the tapered round brush with a .25px stroke. You may want to group them in their own sublayer called "Eyelashes".

Nose, Lips and Other Facial Lines

NOSE BRIDGE (Tapered round brush, .5px for the dominant stroke, and.25 for the other)

NOSE CARTILAGE (Pencil brush at .5 or 1 px)
LIPS (Tapered Sharp brush at .25px) I do a path for each lip. Start each path from the right side and draw around the outside path of the lip so that the stroke tapers on the inside. This will give the outside of the lips dominance.

OTHER FACIAL LINES Now that you are familiar with some of the art brushes, experiment with them to add miscellaneous lines to areas of the face. Around the eyes and forehead for instance. I used the Artbrush1, Tapered, and Fude brush at tiny (.25 or .5) stroke sizes to obtain varying results.
Congratulations, we are done with the first section, The basic face.
You should have something similair to this: