Creation of an Avatar - Part one (sketches)

Welcome back!  This week's project was to design an avatar from a portrait.  Here are the photos that inspired this design along with the initial sketches.

I thought this background would work well on this project:

Credit: Beautiful Waterfall in the Jungle by iCandyGirl

The basis for my Avatar will be the following image:

Credit: Kutia kondh woman uploaded by Kitkatcrazy~commonswiki and licensed under GNU

Here are my initial sketches for this project.  In the interest of full disclosure, due to my lack of artistic ability, the first sketch shown (from which the modifications have been made) was a tracing of the above image.  I felt that was the best way to visualize the modifications in a discernible fashion.

Initial Sketch

Modified as an Avatar