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Hi Janet,
I like the fresh painterly quality you bring to your work. Nice painting!
Here's an idea that might help you with facial proportions when you work from photos: blow up your photo (a Xeroxed black and white is fine for this purpose) to the same size as your painting. Take a clear plastic sheet and draw over the face with a black Sharpie. Use this as a template to place over your painting before every painting session. It will keep you from falling in love with an eye that is a quarter inch off which you will be loathe to move. (Tip on moving eyes: scrape the canvas down so there are absolutely no ridges before you rework it.)
The template is a pretty primitive tool but personally I am too lazy to really learn Photoshop and do photo comparisons that way. I also think this way is faster.
By far the best way to train yourself to draw something exactly is to let your eye flip back and forth from the subject to your painting. Where there is vibration is where you've made a mistake. The Sharpie template is a crutch but it will help you from going too far in a wrong direction. It also won't help you in finding values, color or volume but it will help you with placement of features. When you work from a photo your facial measurements must be exactly right or the likeness will be off.
Most artists who work primarily from photos go to a huge amount of trouble to get everything exactly the same as the photo so if you are going the photorealism route you'll have to do this process of constant remeasurement, one way or another, not only at the start of your painting but at every painting session.
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