My Life Like Value Portrait

1.  The first thing I did was outline every shaded shape I could find in the picture on my clear piece of paper.  I thought about what value each shape would be.  This step took me a while because one side of her face was almost completely shaded over, making it hard to find any shapes on that side of the picture.  Once I had traced these shapes, I transfered them onto a piece of paper in my notebook. I tried to shade each shape the way I had imagined them, eventually finishing the picture.
2. It was hard to find the different values in the portrait.  For one thing, there weren't huge differences in most of the darker shapes.  I would use my imagination in many of the shapes.  For Example,even though the left side of her face was dark; it looked like the hair was a little bit darker, so I shaded in the hair more than the face.
3. I did not achieve a full range of values in the portrait.  I made the left side of her face way too dark.  There were only around three differend values on the portrait, instead of five.  Parts of the face I wanted to look only lightly shaded looked dark black instead.
4. My work was executed almost the opposite of neatly.  While the right side of ther face looks good, the left side was a disaster.  I tried to draw in eyes and eyebrows instead of just letting the shading make them.  The eyes don't line up and the mouth doesn't look how it did in the portrait.   I am satisfied with the mouth though.
5. The biggest obstacle, like I said before, was finding shapes on the darker side of the portrait.  I dealt with them by using my imagination.  Another obstacle was trying to make her look like a person.  I never overcame that obstacle.