New Vanitas drawing begins!

I started this new drawing yesterday. The original photo reference was a B/W image on a medium format film I took over a decade ago. I intended to use this image for printing on sheet metal using liquid photo emulsion back then, but I never did. With that process in mind, I intentionally over-exposed and over-developed this negative 2 ~ 3 stops in order to increase the image contrast. When I test printed this image, the highlight (her face) was unfortunately way too dense and I could not see any textures in there at all. I thought about using this image as a reference for a drawing a couple years ago, and I tried my best to bring back highlight textures in Photoshop with not much success. So I almost gave up on using this image. I reshot its new versions with different models a couple of times and tried to recreate the shot but I could not get the new images close enough to this original which was truer to my vision. So I finally decided to use this old original image as a reference with its warts and all. I am thinking about not drawing her eye at all, and am hoping, by doing so, I might be able to make her face look luminous. Will see...