I recently watched a show called "Landscape Artist of the Year" on youtube where the one of the plein air artists took a photo to help them remember the lighting and shadows of the scene they were painting, then continued to refer to both the photo and the live landscape as they painted, choosing what they liked from each. Hope that helps!?

I began study of art at a local junior college. At the time, it was just for fun and an outlet while I decided what I wanted to do. I found that I could not imagine a life without art, and decided to increase my learning by going to Watts Atelier, where I could get more specific about the subject. I worked part time at a Trader Joes, and did signage and artwork at the store, as well as cashiering and other duties. It was a good job, and for the time felt I would stay with the company part time, and do classes at Watts for pleasure. I began to do some teaching with the school and at the same time a mural at Traders. After 6 months of 2 am shifts and standing on a ladder, I was pretty burnt out with doing art at trader joes. Jeff Watts approached me with working more at the school and less for Joes. I did a lot of odd jobs at the school like model booking and organizing and some teaching. I started on a path of costume making for my own paintings that I was venturing into. Eventually I had was in a gallery. Galleries can be tough to rely on solely. I now teach a little, paint for a couple of galleries, and sell antique textiles through an online business. I started selling textiles after acquiring many of them for my costumes over a decade ago. I like to split my time between these three businesses. I run my online shop in the morning, and paint in the afternoons. I highly recommend having a side job or business to make the transition easier. It is extremely difficult to have a consistent income from just galleries alone. For instance, I would have been in dire straits had I only had a gallery income last year during Covid. My shows were cancelled for last year and this year. I am glad I have other means of bringing in income. It allows me to paint every day without a huge stress hanging over my head.

Good work. I would suggest splitting studies and finished pieces into seperate groups. Thinking about compositional ideas adds another layer of complexity and difficulty that might distract from the thing you wanted to study in the first place. But I guess that could be considered a personal opinion. Structurally there are some issues in your drawings. For example the features of the face in your first drawing do not line up correctly. I'll add an image with the alignments that shows the error. Additionally the individual eyes are tilted relative to one another which is a common mistake. Adding guidelines in the beginning stages of the drawing helps preventing that. The shading of the Asaro head is pretty well done in my opinion, even though again there are structural or proportional issues (check height and width measurements during the lay in). Hope that helps a bit. Keep up the good work. :)