Portrait in progress

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This is 12 hours into this portrait, and I think we will have one more session with this model. Sometimes I feel like the longer I work on something, the less fond of it I become. And I don't know if that's because I get tired of looking at it, or if my preference isn't for images with a higher level of "finish", or if maybe my "finish" isn't quite as intelligent as I would like it to be. I'm not sure. Overall I've been pretty happy with the progression of his portrait, so I'm not trying to degrade it or anything. Just wondering why mentally, I get less  and less enthused as time goes on, because it does seem like I've made progress on it each week. 

I guess maybe it could be that I just don't want it to look like I've labored over the thing (and this one might be starting to show the hours). Not that it's a bad thing to work for a good long time on something. It's just that I want the strokes I make to really count--not to look like I searched and searched for them. And drawn over the same spot in more passes than  absolutely necessary. Economy. Maybe that's what I feel like is getting a little bit lost here.
6, 9, 12 hours

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