Betsy, and Angel
 

Hope you like this....

Yes, better on the gesture with the legs.

I would have to say that I'm still finding the very dark triangle of shadow around the woman's mouth to be distracting and difficult to read. The reference photo isn't giving you useful information in that area. Consider lightening that dark area another value step, or however much you would expect reflected light off the baby's head and shirt to bring the value up. (The addition of light on the upper lip is, I think, exacerbating the heaviness of that shadow.)

It could well be that by the time this is photographed, digitized, scanned and posted, those darks are clustered and showing up harsher on the monitor than on the painting.

I would think your subjects will be pretty delighted with this.

Betsy
 

Is this better?

I think it is, yes.

Yeh!!
 

I finally got brave enough to stop trying to reproduce the photo in that area. It never occurred to me that light might reflect off Angel. Thanks, I think its a big improvement!

I think your experience with the photograph has been very instructive, and I doubt you'll ever have the same difficulty again, at least not without throwing the photo into the analytical process of "What's gone wrong here?" Reference photos are basic tools -- essential tools to many if not most artists showing work on this site, I suspect -- but they're not the unquestionable standard from which you work or by which you judge your work or assess your progress. If a photo begins to lie to you, you must be willing to say 'thanks, we'll call you' and then send it away or at least turn your back on it until the next audition, with a promise to get together "sometime" for lunch.

To your credit, you knew, and said early on, that the heavy darks in the woman's face were troubling to you. It just took a bit of push and shove, back and fill, to figure out where that was coming from and whether it was correct.

You figured it out. You're on your way.

Best wishes.

Learning
 

Thanks again Steven, for the time spent critiquing and the nudges in the right direction. I'm here to learn and constructive criticism is part of the process. It's appreciated. Now on to the next project.