[Garth Herrick]

Barbara,

Here is another suggestion to help you straighten out the drawing and proportions in order to get a good likeness: If you can, print details from the reference photo (of the girl's head and of the boy's head, etc.) to the same scale as the painting. I find this immensely helpful in my own work.

There is a measuring utility in Photoshop buried in the eyedropper tool. Measure the head in the photo, and measure the head in the painting. Divide (using a calculator) the dimension from the painting by the dimension from the photo. Write down the result. Under Image/Image Size in Photoshop you can use that calculation result to multiply with either the height or width dimensions to make the photograph file match the scale of your painting (first you may want to reduce the DPI to 96 so you don't have an overwhelmingly huge file).

Once you get the hang of this it is easy to bring your reference image right up to the scale of your painting, and from that you can print out any detail needed, to hold up right next to your painting for comparison.

Hope this helps!

Garth