Cheaters Always Finish Last in the Game of Life

Here's my second color study.

Improvements:

• the uniform is closer to the right color
• the yellow and orange underpainting worked quite nicely
• the hair is a more sensible color
• reflected light on the face has helped that side

Still To Work On:

• I'm still "jumping the light" - meaning that the lighting is not consistent. The trouble is, I really like that highlight on the soldier's right shoulder - Rockwell had that in his work, but that's because he had the soldier between two windows. This is why I initially thought that I would put the soldier on a train, so I'd also have two windows.
• I've shrunk the eye somehow, I'll be careful about that in the final.
• Deciding the background...I thought about doing a mountain range back there, with the sun rising and just hitting the tips, an echo of his face. I'd have to go dig up a reference on that. Then I thought I ought to just put a night sky behind him and call it "Watching the Campfire" - save myself some trouble. But that seems well, lame. And I'd have to darken everything again for that to make sense.

I had planned to offer some little tidbits from Hale here, but this post is already too long. I'll do that tonight or tomorrow. I'll just part with this...I'm VERY tempted to quit on this. I'd like to just say, "it's too hard" or better yet "it's not really what I want to do," but you know, that would be cheating...cheating myself. No one is making me do this. I do really want to learn, and I think that I (and you dear readers) are going to have to put up with some mistakes and ignorance along my little path of learning. But if I want to be able to do this well, then I have to learn how to do it well.

So, if you are reading this and are tempted to quit on something because the longer you work on it, the more problems you see with it...join me in not wimping out! Decide to finish because it might be your next masterpiece, or because you can be humble enough to admit that learning is good for you, or because it builds character...or just because you are stubborn. And leave me a comment, because I'd love to know that I'm not alone :-).