Oil Portrait - Dark Skin

Here's another oil portrait, this assignment was to learn to paint darker skin tones, as they reflect light differently and will end up having different color variations than lighter skins.

Unfortunately due to all our other homework I didn't have a lot of time to invest in this, it's about 3 or 4 hours of work total, only 2 of which was painting. I experimented a bit with letting the shadow side of the face merge with the background, but didn't quite pull it off, it'll need some more experimenting, and the value will probably have to be lighter to pull it off realistically. Lots of fun overall though, gotta love dem oils!