Trying to find out as to what could be 'wrong with the face'. Hope you don't mind me doodling over your mini. Do like the way you did his boots though. Shiny.
1. Too dark of a recess. It pushes the eye inward and the largeness of this area contributes to his 'suprised look'. (more on that later). Also the area above the eye has the brightest point on the side, when it should be more towards the middle, since it curves around the eye. It's also not really his eyelid I think. That's a little hidden.
2. Strange greenish hues showing up here, not sure what could be the cause of that, could be photo artefacts, but I doubt it. There shouldn't be any green there unless he slipped on his make-up (explaining his dark eyebrow folds)
3. Look at the lighting of the bare mini, somehow paint must've caked on, or you've shaded it just so that the lower eyelid is broader than it should be and stops abrubtly, instead of shading and curving neatly around the eyeball.
4. Firstly, too much saturated redness. Consider a male's face consisting of three areas of average hues. The top area is the forehead, few blood vessels and muscle, mostly skin and minimal amount of fat, so it is partly of a yellowish hue. The middle part is the eyes, cheeks (so the area ABOVE the cheekbones, look up some facial anatomy my friend
) and nose, lots of muscle and blood vessels here on the surface, so it's of a reddish hue (the nose could also have been improved with a subtle reddish tinge), also the ears.
And below that, especially with adult males, is the beard. Which, even when shaved, still lies beneath the skin and bounces off colours. Causing the skin to become subtly more greyish/blueish. So in a sense, more desaturated. Still some red will show up, but to a lesser extent. And also do mind, that the redness in our skin is caused by the light hitting off the blood beneath our skin, and very little light survives that trip and it's mostly overpowered by the light hitting off directly off our skin, which is why it is only really visible at terminators of light on our skin (transition areas from dark to light). This effect is called sub surface scattering by the way, look it up.
Secondly, too dark (or simply too large) and sharply contrasting (though toning down the red would already help in that aspect). Look at the original photo, again. (It really pays off with great models to study how the light reflects off it) I know it's tiny, but see how the shadow of the cheekbone blends in downwards and to the back? How soon it goes to medium tones? Same tones as the side of the head. Also, the yellowness in the cheeks (which makes him look slightly paling as well), furthers the contrast and makes it look slightly unnatural.
5. Yeah, this could just be a little neater. That's it mostly. I know what a pain it can be to paint neatly on such a tiny scale. But a manly moustache like that. Neatness itself. Don't try to obey the surface and curvature of the miniature too much, it's never really perfect, even with great minis, especially if your paint is too thick and chalky or your basecoat didn't work (that's the worst). Don't let the mini tell you where to paint. If you can straighten up some things, by all means do. Give the moustache a nice little curve.
(pulling some redness out of the lines from the nose and toning those down a little would also help bringing out the moustache better)
6. His lower lip is a little pouty. Pouty is good, but perhaps this is too much of a good thing.
Again look closely at how the light reacts to the mini on the right. With males, the lower lip is often less red in tone and also a lot less wide than with females. And the red part doesn't cover the whole of the lower lip. The underside is just normal skin again. Upperlip could have a little more redness on the top lip, teensy amount, underside mostly and greyness above it for contrast and that realism factor.
(reality being: men can never shave properly and it always grows back too fast)
7. Hair transitions are always finnicky, again neatness is key paint the hair strands yourself if you must, to make the transition straighter and smoother, looking at real life reference can help here. It sometimes helps if you shade a mixed tone on the transition area, slightly. Softening the transition slightly. With beards at least. Don't go doing that on foreheads, just a 'heads up'. (oh god someone shoot me)
8. Can't really see this eye too well. But it's really dark beneath the eyelid, same as the other eye, making the lower eyelid look really thick (are you really thinning down your paints enough?). And again giving a slight mascara look.
9. Wait...where did 9 go? Are you confused yet? I am. Moving on.
10. Yeah. He's really surprised, surprised that you put that eyebrow there. Get yourself some photo reference. Eyebrows only get that high up if someone is really surprised, and his smooth forehead isn't tellingme that, and then still the side at the nose, doesn't raise as much. And with miniatures, since you're working on such a tiny area, it's better to keep eyebrows small and close to the eyes, so to evade the whole 'surprised look'. I've drawn some suggestion lines for eyebrows on the right photo in bright green (yes you should make them bright green as well).
11. Oooh, look at the light coming trough the ruff on the original mini! See how it's not absolutely dark because of its translucency? I don't know if it would be entirely feasible to do, it would be hard at the least. But very interesting, since ruffs are in reality made of thin fabrics which are partly translucent, if you look at some old paintings, you see as well that the inner part is a little bright. It really adds to the organic feel of the thing.
Sorry little sidetracked there. But I'm not sure if I have much more to say other than that it is still a great job on the mini, considering the difficulty and hopefully I've helped clear up some things a little.
Cheers.
