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Well, I will be very short on this. I see two main obstacles that are giving you trouble. One seems to be a lack of planning (or a appearance of it). The composition is very nice but your choice of cropping is less then desirable. Always try and avoid cutting off hands and bare arms legs or feet. Now if you cropped, or used a vignette to soften the cropping, then it could work better. The second obstacle is your lighting: the form on the dark side of the face is not well defined, and it is obviously giving you trouble. It is of utmost importance to control your lighting and not let it control you. If your light is not defining your form you can't paint it.
I did a few things here to show a few choices that might have improved your painting. Now I did not worry about being accurate her, just to show how a different lighting might have helped.
If you look at your photo you can see that the reflected light does offer some of the effect that I show in the 2 light source example, but it is not as defined. In the 2 light sources that I show, your darkest values would be down the center. And I exaggerated a cooler light on your subjects left with a warm light on the right. In the single source example, I show how, if you had some light on the left cheek, it would help define the line of the nose and the plane as it turns around the head to the left.
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