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Jeanine,
I think you had the cards stacked against you on this one, due to the absence of dramatic light effects in your source material. You wrote that you'd had to contrive some of the lighting, which is an awfully difficult thing to pull off. It's hard enough to accurately depict light effects you can see. It looks like you've pushed your dark values way down, perhaps to compensate for the fact that there's very little more light that can be wrung out of the set-up.
I think this has great potential with different lighting. I played around with the image in Photoshop and found that by bringing up the value of the flesh tones and reducing greatly the value of the background (trying a variety of hues), as if the woman had just stepped forward into the light from a noonday sun, she suddenly comes forward visually and has a presence there at the rail. I'd love to see the play of sunlight on that great red hat, as well as the temperature variations in the flesh tones as they move in and out of that light.
Right now your background isn't doing any work for you, it doesn't have any sense of mystery about it, little if any color, little variation in values -- within itself or in relation to the figure -- of the sort of deliberate design that would contribute to the overall idea of the piece. I'm looking for a sense of space behind the woman that I'm not seeing.
I think her left hand could use a little revision. The wrist is almost wider than the span of knuckles, when in fact it should be (and the photo shows this) considerably narrower. Also the knuckles of the middle and ring finger seem to have disappeared, creating the impression that those two fingers are very short in relation to the others. Dig out and restate those shadow shapes around the knuckles; they're very descriptive of the anatomical form.
Cheers,
Steven
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