Denise,
Without seeing samples it's hard to give advice. So I will start at the basics of portrait lighting. My mentor suggested to me once that I study paintings of Rembrant for lighting technique. I saw right off that his paintings were different for male and female. For a male the lighting came from one side and a shadow was cast from the nose on the opposite side of the face. Just enough lighting would spill over to that side and create a small triangular shape of light on the cheek just below the eye. For females they were often lit up more from the front and the shape of light would be more like a butterfly spanning across both cheeks evenly. If you google Rembrant you will see what I mean. To think that he did this 400 years ago with candle light shows the pure genius that we follow today. I'm no expert but here are a couple of samples that illustrate this technique.
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Originally Posted by deltasun
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