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The drawing is generally excellent, good placement and proportioning, good job on foreshortening the lower arm. The detail in the gown and bouquet exhibits great observation (and a lot of patience!), and the hair is nicely handled.
There are a few areas in the drawing that you might review:
1-- The brow seems a bit too thick, high and prominent. In a full head profile like this, I'd expect to see the eyebrows -- which sit forward of the eyes on the upper rim of the eye sockets, between which the brow turns under to meet the nose -- extend at least to the front edge of the face. (Otherwise it appears that there's a substantial vertical bulge in the brow between the eyebrows.) I'm not sure "from where I sit" if the solution lies in reshaping the brow, moving the eye, or extending the eyebrow. While we're looking at that area, the angle at which the brow meets the top of the nose looks a bit too sharp, unusual in a female.
2-- The narrow shadow stripe by which you separate the eyelid from the shadow on the side of the nose is too dark and extends too high, suggesting a deep crease or signficant fold in the flesh, but at that point -- above the influence of the eyeball orb -- the skin would be smooth and not interrupted by that sudden dark stripe.
3-- The jawbone appears short, but this is tricky, because I'm quite sure the effect is created by her slightly downturned head, which causes the flesh at the front of the neck to bunch up a little and suggest a "false" jaw. What to do? I would lie a little. I'd shave off that entire crescent of reflected light (more about which, later) along the bottom of the jaw. This would have the flattering effect of tightening up the skin on that jawline, and also move the turn of the jaw slightly aft of its unfortunate siting right where the front of the neck meets the jaw.
4-- The pearl necklace doesn't seem to fall downward as quickly as I'd expect. Cover up the last two or three pearls and see if the necklace doesn't seem to better hang (even if we can't actually see it!) with the correct weight.
Believe it or not, I didn't start out here intending to talk about drawing at all. I wanted to focus on the very very dark darks in the painting, both on the figure and in the background. The shadows underneath the cheekbone and on the back of the head, neck, shoulders and arms look to me to be just too dark and drained of the emotions of color.
The darkest patches of shadow also create a problem with overmodeling, by which I mean forcing into one area too many shapes with too great a values extension. The cheekbone is one area, and the model's left arm is definitely another. In the latter, you could completely remove the darkest shadow tone (except perhaps where the bouquet casts a shadow) and not only not lose form, but gain a great deal. A similar problem occurs on the neck, below the ear. The overmodeling, the dark shadow stripe against the lighter adjacent areas, also suggests a crease in the flesh that wouldn't be there; the skin below and behind the ear joins the skin of the neck smoothly.
In a nutshell, lighten up your shadow areas. Only in a darkened room would Caucasian flesh be that dark. You're forfeiting the beauty in half your figure. And the point of my going on at length here is that this is a very beautiful subject, generally well rendered, on what would be (it is hoped) a "lighted" day, an illuminated event. I think that but for the dampening effect of the dark shadow areas, and the lack of color in the darkest background darks, the event might have been captured even more effectively.
By the way, since you asked about the veil, I think it's pretty good, but could use some variation in the way it's influenced by the light. For example, we'd expect it to be brighter in the light that is coming over the woman's left shoulder. Try scumbling some light onto one or two areas of the veil, using the tooth of the canvas if possible, to suggest the net shear of the veil. And in the shadow areas, we'd expect to lose that bright edge here and there.
Hope some of this seems useful.
Steven
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