Do you have any other hidden talents we didn't know? Seriously, you are good at drawing, I really like your style

I think the upper eyelids need to be a bit lowered. Peoples eyes are partially covered by the lids. Also, perhaps the pupils are too large. The eyes look very good, they just look too big and wide open.

The profile is really good! I'd agree with 2-ton, though, I think the eyes (pupils especially) are just a bit too big. The rest looks great.

The face did come out pretty good molly. 2/3 perspective is a pretty advanced perspective. It is easier in the sense of the sillhouettes (especially the nose) coming forward more than they do front-on. It's harder in the sense of having to care about the perspective planes of the face. Mostly you get that right, which is great work for a "first".

I'm not that bothered about the pupils - they are big but some styles of eyes may use that trick to make the face more attentive and "present". The furthermost eye (her left) should probably be a tad smaller overall due to perspective, but the effect is subtle.
Other feedback is that the mouth here is a tad off, it's the plane of the face that is not quite correct in perspective I think. Try to picture the skeleton underneath - making a rough skeletal head sketch on a separate layer is usually helpful (it need not be very advanced).

A good hint when drawing faces on the computer is to put keyboard shortcuts on the Horisontal/Vertical flip. Flip your image all the time, it helps keeping your eye "fresh" to eventual asymmetries. It's very easy to go "blind" after having worked on the same face for a while. I have a tutorial on drawing faces if you are interested (it's in the sig). That is showing a front-on perspective though.

But these are minor tweaks, she's very pretty already which is not at all guaranteed when making a portrait for the first time. Good job so far.
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Griatch

Thank you very much guys and gals. Griatch. That is very informative. I knew the mouth was off but couldn't get it fixed and the eyes did look very strange to me.
I will look at your tute also. This is one I looked at last night which was amazing too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy8Xz6PIf3Q

That's a beautiful painting Molly. The eyes look fine to me for that scale. As for blending I'm of no use to you because I still have difficulty with MyPaint. I love your style.

Thank you Eris. I also use Gimp for blending but I can't get it as smooth looking as yours, Do you use the smudge tool to get it so even or is there another tool I haven't discovered yet?

I always paint with a fuzzy brush and use the smudge tool afterwards but I tend to build up shadow slowly, working on a new layer each time and adjusting the opacity.

Thanks Eris, will give it a try.

molly: that's beautiful! i really love the eyes, they catch you immediately and the shiny reflections in the pupils look so right. i think you got the shading right too, and that's much more important for the picture than the blending!

Thank you AnMal, I still need to fix the mouth and the one eye. I was thinking of starting from scratch but I dunno, maybe start with another person instead. Anyway, not getting much dusting, vaccuming, cooking done these days though. .

If you paint shadows on a separate layer any blotches made by smudging can easily be erased. When I paint shadows I use a large fuzzy brush to get plenty of edge softness then erase into it to shape the shadow. Smudging should be done carefully with only light pressure on your tablet.

Thank you Eris, I will give that a try. I find that when I do my smudging, it leaves some of the layer transparent. Am I supposed to put in a solid layer under the layer I am working on so I won't see through it. I think this is why my picture ended up with a white haze. I put a white bg behind it.

Smudging will do that. You can adjust the opacity of the smudge brush to ensure some paint gets left behind but I find that going lightly helps in this situation. I think you had a selection when you smudged? I think that is what caused the outline. I would do the smudging without a selection then use alpha to selection on the woman layer, select the shadow layer, invert the selection and hit the delete key to remove excess.

Thank you again.

Smudging is best done using a very low opacity brush (max 5-15% opacity). I recommend creating a round and maximally "fuzzy" procedural brush using the in-built brush editor to avoid hard edges. Make sure to assign keyboard shortcuts to rescale the brush size easily and without having to lift the pen from the canvas. Applying smudge requires some traning - it usually involves short, brief strokes, ideally in small rotating motions.
It's worth to remember that one should not overdo smudging - it's best used on small areas in order to make smooth transitions between colours.

I'd also recommend never to contain a foreground figure in a selection. You will get a more natural result by sharpening your edges with a round hard brush and manually erasing excess with the eraser tool.

It's tempting to separate the image from the background on a separate layer, but I would recommend (maybe for future works) to do the foreground and background all on the same layer. Whereas this style is not for everyone or for advanced compositions (it gets harder to adjust edges), it's a very useful exercise.
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Griatch

Thank you so much Griatch. I will try to make one of those soft brushes. but I don't understand the sentence above.
I sure wish you lived next door.

It seems like your image has a sharp and slightly whitish edge to it here and there. I was referring to Erisian's observation/guess that a selection was involved to avoid going over the edge.

I should probably add that this version of the image is really nice anatomically, the eyes and mouth are both excellently in perspective now, good job!
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Griatch

Thank you again...Why is it when I do some blending...smudging some parts of the layer goes transparent. This has been happening so I put a white layer in behind and I think that is why this white happened around the edges. Should I be using a different layer for every part of the picture?