Critique my drawing skills, Southperry

I'm mostly self-taught in arts (although I'm graduating from an art school now), you should listen to raizoo but here are a few more general tips from the top of my head:

• Perhaps the most important thing in portraits is the ratio and placement of things. If you're beginning with portraits it would help to have the reference picture in same size that you're going to draw. Nowadays it's easy to change the size on computer. Like raizoo said, have the reference close to you when you draw.
  
• Focusing on key areas. These would be eyes and nose, getting those right will make the drawing a lot more recognizable. After those focus on the mouth.
  

Resizing pictures can be easily done in many photo editing programs. You could download GIMP and resize the image there. You can also do this in paint but the quality will suffer. See here for more: http://www.wikihow.com/Resize-Digital-Photos