Now this one was a piece of cake compared to my past character heads.
With the new test dev release of MakeHuman, a little rendering work from Aqsis, and a few adjustments to a mesh, I was able to put together a low-poly head/face that still retains nice texture detail.
This head has less than 400 total verts, despite what it might look like.
(I've only mapped it from the front so far, which explains the artifacts on the sides. When I'm done it'll look nicer.)
Thanks to recent developments in the Makehuman software, this took only a few minutes to put together once I figured out just how to go about doing it. Yes, the days of the old, hard way of making character heads is fading, and much less of a chore now.
BTW, MH software now automatically makes clothing too, automatically shaped to fit the body meshes it exports.
It still needs some tweaks, and of course hair, but it should come out much better than my past works.