Seeking critique on portrait

[Amit Dutta]

Hey man, I think you should first plot out and think about the simple shapes, planes of the face first. You seem to be using a soft brush mostly for the rendering and you are not really defining the forms of the face. Try not to get caught up in the details but think about the overall structure of the features. Perhaps do a quick line drawing of the basic planes and then use a hard edged brush to define them. Then you can tweak them to start modeling the features to be more accurate. The next thing would be to think about lost and found edges...take a look at the image and get a feel for which of the main landmarks you want to accentuate the hard edges in order to draw focus and define form. Similarly, lose/smudge/blur edges where surfaces turn away to get some depth going.

I followed this approach for my paintover. Not a great likeness but I think the structure is a decent base to build on and keep refining. Your image is also getting a bit muddy in colour so really push the usual ideas of red around the eyes and nose, greens around the jaw etc etc. It's actually in the ref too, but really simplify it down.
In fact I think the trick with portraits in general is in efficient translation and simplification more than the capturing of accurate detail.

Another thing to think about now is your composition. I'm not sure what you have in mind, but definitely the headdress and background should all go towards accentuating the focus on the face. Engineer the folds and the lighting and shadowing to pull the focus down to where you want it to be.

Here's my paintover. I used only a hard edged brush and a smudge tool.  Hope it helps!