Dear Jimmie,
Your daughter is just beautiful. I enjoyed reading your introduction, and I can see how very well your "day" job has contributed to your fine art work. I think that pastel is a natural path from airbrushing; and the planning and precision required for tatooing, I'm sure, are excellent skills to apply to portrait painting.
The one observation I have is that it appears that you are using flash photographs for your source material. Your drawing skills are very strong, as is your use of value in modeling a three-dimensional image, yet I think that you could go so much further with really great source photos. There is a great deal of information here on photographing subjects, not only the threads located here:
http://forum.portraitartist.com/foru...?s=&forumid=47
but many of the posts by Forum members like Mike McCarty, Karin Wells, and many others.
Welcome to the Forum; it will be exciting to see more of your work.
Kindest regards,