Revising a painting

I'm trying to start and finish a couple paintings before the school year begins, but I feel like I can't move on until I fix this one that I did for a class in June:

It was my last painting for the class, and I finished it just an hour before final critique. Consequently, I didn't get a lot of time to look at it and let it talk to me. I knew it didn't want the top of the figure the way it was, but I didn't have time to figure out what it wanted instead. This painting stumped me all through July and into August, until I remembered a painting I'd seen and photographed at the Art Institute of Chicago in July:

Portrait of Constance Pipelet by Jean-Baptiste-Francois Desoria, 1797, oil on canvas.

I like the figure's pose and attitude, so I decided to appropriate bits of it. I don't know if my figure will hold a book, and I know she won't have the same hair, clothing, etc. (The high heels stay!) But seeing this painting again got me out of my rut. Artists borrow from art history all the time.

In any case, here's a picture (it's a little awkward-looking because I took it with the camera on my laptop, which was not easy) of my progress so far. I accidentally made this great pink color that I added in a few places, started some apples on the right, and sketched some of the figure in with charcoal. (The lines you see now will probably all be rubbed off; they're just placeholders.)



So now I'll keep looking at it, adding lines and pushing and pulling them back. It's like editing a paper. Almost.