Do I know you?

One of my main problems regards anatomy and figure painting. 

Last month I decided to improve myself by sketching some portraits found in a old hair fashion magazine. The first sketch was so bad, and did not correspond at all to the photo, so I began, very frustrated, to change a lot of things in the face, until I got a completely weird creature. Back to my usual love for marine stuff, I start to add more and more elements resembling a sea monster. At home, we start to speculate that this creature could pretty much look like a hypothetic concept for the coming movie Avatar and the Deep Sea (or whatever the title will be): a humanoid sea alien depicted in hers first contact with a new species from the deep oceans.

My boyfriend suggested that she(he?) could very much do something, so I elongated the canvas and added shoulders, arms and hands. She is holding some kind of unknown and luminescent animal, for which I loosely got inspiration from googling radiolarian pictures.

Now I had to deal even harder with anatomy issues (well, I punished myself..) so we took some pictures of myself and my hands and paint them into the first concept, until I felt somehow satisfied or, better said, fed up. (I can anyway tell that I don't usually look like this, at least not in public). I'm still not very convinced about the result, but at a certain point I wanted to go further.

I need to find a way to get a more saturated image, normally I work at home and the colours look bright, but then, when I look at the pictures from another screen, the image becomes dark, desaturated and muddy.

And a couple of close-ups: