How I Turned My Painting Around

I'm working on a painting that's an experiment to see how what kind of results I can get by layering colors on top of each other. I started with a black and white underpainting, like I do with all my pieces, which looked like this.

My plan was to glaze green on top of it and then I would glaze pink on that and the two colors together would create a neutral skin color. For info on what I'm basing this on, see this post about complementary colors. 
Anyway, so I glazed a couple layers of green on top and so far everything was looking good.

But when I added the pink, I made the mistake of not thinning it down enough so it not only completely covered up my green underneath, it covered up all the work I had done on my underpainting as far as her features and stuff. Needless to say, I wasn't very happy at this point.

From there it turned into a cycle of turning her pink,

then turning her green again,

then turning her pink again. 

​Finally, I was like, I can't continue like this, I gotta go to plan B. So I decided to paint over her whole face with an opaque green. This would serve the same purpose as my original black and white layer, which was to put down her values and features

So that's where I am in the process of this painting now. My plan next is to glaze pink over it, as was intended. I've figured out now that I need to thin the paint down a lot  for this to work. Putting just a few spritzes of water in the paint won't be enough. I need to water it down to the point where it's practically just water with color in it before I paint over the green.

I'll let you know how adding the pink went in the next post.

The reason I'm telling you this is because I want to show you the importance of finishing a piece and sometimes that requires you to find a way to turn a bad piece around and try a different plan than the one you were using. There was a time during the process that I was tempted to scrap the whole thing and say forget about it. But if I'd done that, not only would I be wasting the canvas and the paint, I would be wasting the time I'd spent working on it up until now and that's just not acceptable.