A Challenge

I started another posthumous portrait for the Lost Dreams project. The family provided photos to work from, but I'm at a standstill. One photo was what looked to be an 8th grade graduation picture, blurry, with a sun-in-the-eyes squint. Another is an odd angle, from below. In the last, the young man is wearing opaquely dark sunglasses and a baseball hat. I decided to use the third, because it was the closest thing to a traditional portrait pose, and the placement of the hand might give him a thoughtful look. But the sunglasses are proving to be a terrible problem. I've been trying for days to glean enough information from the three photos to give me a sense of what he looks like. I'm going to leave the hat on his head because I can't see what his head is really shaped like and that is so basic to getting a likeness. I can tell his eyes are deep set and a beautiful gray blue, but I'm having an awful time getting them to look like they're set in his head properly and that they're the same eyes in the picture taken from below. It got me thinking again about how much these portraits must mean to a family who may only have a couple of poor quality snapshots as mementos. I will keep working on this. If anyone has any ideas about how I could do this, please let me know.