[Karin Wells]

Chris Saper gave you some excellent advice and I would like to think that you will reconsider some if not all of it. It isn't often that someone of her stature gives such an insightful critique in order to help another artist. And I think that some of her right-on-target points deserve to be repeated:

...I think you have a very lovely, well-done resource photo; I like the position of the hand in the photo. By moving it to rest on the chair, you've created not only a little eye-trap with the back of the chair, but have a light value against a strong dark triangle that moves the eye out of the picture at the bottom. The globe's position, combined with its value and strong color saturation, competes very strongly, and threatens to overpower the man's head. By perhaps choosing instead to position the globe behind the figure on a table of some sort, your shapes would be connected, and the forms overlap, so that the globe could more readily become subordinate to the figure.

Looking at your photo, I think it is wonderful how the light shoulder actually does fall against the darker ground, and the reverse happens with the shoulder in shadow. I think this is so often an invented convention for painters, that when it really occurs, it lends a very strong sense ot the quality of the light on the form.