Interface And Graphics :: "Portrait Chooser" Using Resource File?

I'm building a basic text based adventure game (main purpose is to just keep me fresh between programming classes during break, since I have my final VB course next semester and am trying to explore some different concepts and ideas for coding in VB) in Visual Studio 2008. During the character creation process, the user is allowed to choose a portrait to represent their character in game. I've loaded up my resource file with the portraits in question, but there is one thing I'm having some trouble with when it comes to selecting the portraits from that file. Keep in mind, I know how to do this exact thing by loading the pictures up into their own asset folder and grabbing them from there to display on the form. The resource file seems like a more intelligent way of doing it, but I've not used it much in past applications.

So, when the user clicks on the "next" arrow to cycle through the possible portrait choices, I want to change the current image in the picture box from, let's say, image1, to image2. Straight forward and all.I could load all of these images up into an image list, but again, this is all for exploratory purposes, so the following if statement is being used for that purpose only. I plan to code a more effective way of cycling through the images at a later date.

If picCharPort.Image = My.Resources.Image1 Then
picCharPort.Image = My.Resources.Image2
End If

For some reason, I am fully capable of assigning My.Resources.Image1 to picCharPort.Image normally, but when I attempt to switch the image to another image like in this if statement, it creates and error.It essentially does not like the "=" operator being used, so I switched it to Is, and it still doesn't work (however, without displaying an error).(considering, the portrait options change depending on character class/gender, etc)?