Eric
I created a bristled painting of my nephew by painting over a photo in Paintstorm and then emphasizing the bristles in iColorama.
I started with this photo taken by my Mom.
I processed the photo in iColorama using Adjust/EQ and Adjust/Tonelab for tonal separation, and I used Style/Coherence and Denoise/Smooth for smoothness. This was in preparation for painting.
I opened the image in Paintstorm Pro and painted it using the Rand Texture brush (thanks to a suggestion from Yuri Malkov).
On a duplicate layer, I used the Hard Dirty Knife Blend brush.
In iColorama, I applied Effect/Raise at low opacity to each of these images, to emphasize the strokes.
Using Effect/Blend, I blended the softened image on top of the texture brush image, with a bit of masking on the face. I used Brush/Paint to paint in catchlights on the eyes and some more detail on the mouth, and I used Adjust/Exposure with an inverted brush mask to lighten the whites of the eyes. I made some color adjustments in Tone/Enhance and Tone/Duotone (Multiply mode at low opacity). And I used Preset/Border preset 3 at low opacity and low radius and a brush mask to protect the interior of the image, for a bit of vignetting.
In Brush/Paint, I painted an eyebrow on the left.
