[Chris Saper]

Dear Richard,

I am sorry that I missed commenting on this portrait earlier. I really love the way you have handled the skin tones, the shirt and the background. I feel that the orange foreground is a bit arbitrary, though, in that it doesn't have the variety and color movement that is present in the rest of the piece.

Your perspective is odd because there is photo distortion in your resource photograph. In order to have avoided it, you would have had to stand considerably farther away from your model, then zoom in. (From this angle, you'd have probably needed a step stool!) That being said, I don't really mind the distortion as it adds to the impression of the point of view.

I'll take a stab at making a photo shop adjustment - here I selected most of what was below the neckline, and just stretched it downward using the Image Transform Skew Command.