Immortal - Egypt / Scythia

This is Mau, my Immortal sphinx character for my Costuming class.  Unfortunately I misunderstood the first assignemt and did it wrong, but I still liked the end result.  My elbow has started to hurt due to straining myself to finish homework so I'm uploading some classwork to keep busy.  One of the main crits I'm getting about her is that her dark skin fades away into the background, so if anyone could show me some good tutorials for painting dark skin I'd appreciate it.