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One of my my favorite themes is a face that is broken or distorted, and another is unusual texture on a face or figure. Here I combined these two ideas, using Metabrush to produce the textures and iColorama to create the broken face.
I started with this photo from Pixabay, a source of copyright-free images.
I opened the photo in iColorama and used Effect/Denoise Smooth preset and Effect/Glow at low opacity, to smooth the image.
I created this texture in MetaBrush. I used Brushes/Paint mode, using a medium-sized triangular brush at 100% opacity. In brush settings, I set spacing to its maximum value, I set position variance and rotation variance to their maximum values, and I left dynamics and extras at their default values.
In the MetaBrush step, I used this Pixabay photo as brush image. (While in Brushes/Paint, to choose the brush image, touch the flower icon on the left edge of the screen and select an image from your camera roll.)
In iColorama, I used Effect/Blend to blend the texture over the image. I used a brush mask to protect the eyes and background. I tried different blending modes and slider settings.
I used Adjust/EQ preset 1 and Adjust/Levels to brighten the image.
I used Effect/Denoise and Style/Simplify to smooth the image.
I used Effect/Raise to emphasize the texture.
I produced this texture by using Effect/Blend to blend the texture image above with another image, trying several blending modes and slider settings, including the sliders under Set.
I used Effect/Blend to blend this texture over the image. I used a brush mask to confine the texture to the eyes and background.
I used Effect/Glow at low opacity, Effect/Light at low opacity, and Adjust/High Preset 1 at medium opacity for a lighting effect.
I used Adjust/Exposure and moved the Brightness slider all the way to the left, to make a black canvas. Then I used Effect/Blend to blend the image on top of the black canvas, and used a brush mask with a triangular brush to mask half of the face.
Starting again with the full image, I did the same for the other half of the face. Don't be concerned if the two halves don't match exactly.
In iColorama, I opened the image with the left half of the face. I used Effect/Blend to blend the image with the right half of the face on top of that. I repositioned and rotated the top image a bit. I used a brush mask to paint away the left side of the top image so it would not obscure the bottom image. I used a medium-to-large soft brush for the brush mask so it could form a shadow, as if the right half of the face were sliding underneath the left half of the face.
I used Effect/Blend to blend the image with itself several times, to blend in the background texture where there were gaps, including in the space between the two halves of the face. Each such blend step required its own inverted brush mask.
To finish the piece, I used Tone/BW&C, Tone/Enhance, a Preset under Texture/Leak in Overlay mode at low opacity, and Preset/Border preset 2 for vignetting, with a brush mask to prevent the vignetting from darkening the middle of the image.
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