I am jumping in to the contests here on steemit, and this is my second attempt at the art explosion weekly contests hosted by @juliakponsford.

I was feeling less than inspired for the last couple days, but after making my t-shirt design earlier I decided what I needed to do was make something totally different. Usually I work in photos...or I work in paint. Sometimes digital paint, but not lately. I saw a very small snippet of an artists process on instagram @lisa.falzon. She is amazing drop everything and go look at her work. She does some collage work in her digital paintings sometimes and it was just the coolest effect. She is a thousand times better at it than my sad attempt here, but it was fun to try something totally different and blend photos into digital painting.

The mouth, eyes and the clothing are all photographs. The clothing is photographs of fabric, but I masked the entire layer so that I could paint it back in with a textured brush, it makes it look so painterly, you probably can't even tell its a picture.
Here's some shots I took of the progress: Also haha I spelt explosion wrong...yeesh, I need to go to bed earlier, im just losing it today!

And the final reveal!!