If you don’t mind, I’m going to do my best to be a complete dick. What everyone else said is true, you have unbelievable talent, not just technically, but also with composition and such which is nothing you can learn.
With that being said, if we want to get into surrealism, the hair is fine. It’s realistic enough to be believable, but if you make it too realistic there’s no way to get all the shit in the hair to look believable together. It looks a lot like Magritte’s surrealistic approach. Also, I’m not sure how surrealistic this is, in the classic sense. A true surrealistic piece would have some form of piercing flesh (only mostly joking).
The main problem with the composition is the balance - both in luminance, hue, and graphic weight. Oh, here I’m saying in a classic sense, so if you do things different on purpose, then disregard. Also, I’m painting a square right now. Squares are a bitch to work with, so I sympathize.
And first, I would rotate it, like thus. But that’s a personal thing, I’ll assume you’ll stick with how you have it from here on out.
So, luminence. Basically, the upper right hand corner needs lightened, along with a smidgen of the lower left. That way, you have the gradient moving into one corner, which causes the eye to follow from your hand to your eyes, which are the two things with the most graphic weight. If you keep that corner darker, it makes everything go bonkers. Kinda like this.
All right, hue. Basically, you’re missing yellow, or more particularly, orange. You have a nice tan through the back, but it’s not yellow enough. I’m not sure if that’s raw linen or what, but it really needs a vibrant orange to set off everything. You know, complements and all that. See here.
Obviously, you’ll have to go back through and mess with the reflected shadows to make it work, but that isn’t so bad. Oh, and you’ll need to put a smidgen of orange between your neck and shoulder and hair, so that way you’ll have MASS OF ORANGE and then a tiny little area of orange, which will really answer each other. I’d also change all the reds to red red orange.
And speaking of answering, you see those two streaks of paint on the hair between your eyes and the hand in the lower right hand corner? I’d form them more into the shape of the hand, you really need a shape to answer that really bold one formed by the fingers. Oh, and if you make the nose stand out just a tad more, that would be amazing. That way it would be the paintbrush in the top left corner pointing to the nose which points to the V in the hair which answers The Hand which abruptly stops the motion with the strong black outline.
This is a lot harder online than in person. I’ll stop there unless I think of anything else. Please ask for clarifications, because I know I muddled a lot of stuff above.
(Also, random comment: A lot of artists now seem to think they can pick up a brush and start making pretty colors, completely ignoring the human figure and/or realism. It’s really, really nice to see not only someone painting realistically, but painting it so damn well. It’s something that I can’t quite get right and it’s a really under-appreciated skill. Kudos.)
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