Surly - Take 2

I intended to leave more black gesso in this second attempt. Still, the face shape is much better than the first try.

Here is the picture, although it is not cropped to the same dimensions.

Attempt 1:

 Attempt 2:

In Carol Marine's book, Daily Painting, she talks about the need to put in your time learning how to paint. She talks about either 10,000 hours or 500 paintings. One of the advantages to painting small is that it should take significant less than 10,000 hours to do 500 paintings. While I haven't counted sequentially, my guess is I'm around 250 or so. While I can still see a lot of room for improvement, I feel good about the progress that I've made and am currently making.