Learning to paint Portraits

One of my goals for improving as an artist is to extend the range of subjects which I can paint with good ability. This includes painting people and portraits better and learning about tone and colour in dealing with images like the above. This is a half completed painting I started last week. I have used a variety of ochres and cadmium red with these and white to get the skin tones. I have to decide on the colour for the pillow yet, and was thinking a light blue. I will post updates of this when finished which will be in a week or two as I am only painting this in my art class. In the meantime I will be working on my other paintings, most of which are landscape subjects.