[Steven Sweeney]

Monique,

I haven't been into the Critiques area for quite a while, hence the tardiness of my observations.

I've actually twice this evening filled a "Reply" window, and even did a little Photoshop double-checking, but didn't post either effort, because I didn't feel I was explaining myself very well.

But I'm a compulsive sort, so I'm just going to make some parting notes about some things to consider as you make your final revisions.

I don't know if an instructor told me this or if I read it somewhere, but the advice was essentially to make sure that the thing you're changing is the thing that needs to be changed.

That eye may indeed need to be moved, but to even know how much to move it, you might benefit from making a few other tiny adjustments. One of the reasons that eye looks high is because the lower half of the face has become slightly skewed toward our left and cast slightly downward, which then of course just amplifies the eye effect.

I see four areas that have contributed to this "skewing" (these are just to my eye, mind you, nothing "true" or "false" about this):

1- You've let the corner of the mouth on our right side drop down. This is apparent in the close-up, where you've painted the dark line between the lips to drop down suddenly before reaching the corner of the mouth. If we think generically, a line between the irises of the eyes and a line between the corners of the mouth would be roughly parallel (or on parallel circles of latitude, if we think in terms of the head's round shape, in any orientation). By lowering the right-side corner of the mouth, those lines instead diverge, and depending on one's perspective, the corner of the mouth will either look "low" or the eye on that same side "high."

2- I think the chin is slightly too narrow. It is very slight, but I do think, looking at the photograph, that the chin is slightly more "underneath" the mouth/muzzle structure than appears in the painting. Put another way, the mass of the chin structure is moved slightly to our left, which in turn pulls the lower part of the face in that direction, and adds to the downcast aspect of that part of the face.

3- The cheek contour on the shadow side is just every slightly too wide and too generically round.

4- Slightly too much of the middle tone on the nose is moving over into the lighted side, which turns the structure of the nose toward us. Letting the light flow just a bit more across the bulb of the nose will keep the centerline of the nose closer to the hair-to-neck centerline arc (the longitude counterpart to the latitude lines, mentioned above), the sort of thing you'd see by drawing a vertical line on an egg and then turning the egg about 30 degrees to the right.

Think about those things and make any adjustments that seem right, at which time you may decide not to move the eye at all, or you may decide that it does need to be moved, but only 1/8 inch instead of the 1/4 inch or whatever seemed necessary in isolation.

A Photoshop demo image wouldn't be helpful here. There are too many things going on at once, so you're going to have to make the calls as you go. For example, perhaps widening the chin will make the cheek contour adjustment unnecessary -- I simply can't know.

My major point is to encourage you to ask a larger question than merely, is the eye too high? Rather, take notice of the fact that observers are telling you that the eye seems too high, and then spend some time looking at the overall structure to determine what it is that might be contributing to that effect. Because if the location of the eye is only one of, say, five contributing factors, and you move the eye, there will still be four things not quite "right," and if you then go in and adjust each of those in isolation, the newly-moved eye might be in the "wrong" place -- again!

If it all comes down to moving the eye -- do it. But back up and re-think in terms of value shapes and other fundamentals, rather than "moving an eye." That will be less intimidating -- and it will work better, anyway.