It is a segment of a photograph from a photographer whose work I really rather admire. The original photo is available at this link: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery ... -/2125714/. Aegipan was kind enough to give me permission to stitch this image.
A few details.
It is small at 184 stitches wide and 48 stitches high on 25 count evenweave using 2 over one tent stitch, concentrating on the eyes - simply the most difficult part of a portrait to get right. Aegipan got it right, now the stitching has to emulate it. This is intended as a test piece to assess the blending performance of my charting program. There are 103 blends and 15 solid colours, made up from 151 discreet thread colours. For stitching I have the long side vertical, but am normalising the progress shots to match the orientation of the initial image. I started off Parking, and, well, I possibly wasn't very well organised, and after 2 weeks had only 214 stitches done:

Since I abandoned Parking, things have gone rather more quickly, and in the 4 days since I gave up, I've probably added another 300 stitches. The very faint pink rectangle is the full extent of the image:

At the moment I'm just using up the threads that were driving me to distraction while parking. Once those ones are finished, I will start to add more colours.
Hopefully I'm learning as I go along, and the picture will start to come to life.
Regards,
Richard.