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I tried here for a smooth transparent veil covering a texturized face. Maybe she is melting, maybe she is doused with water, maybe she is trying to to be obscured behind a veil.
I started with this dreamy looking photo from Pixabay, a source of copyright-free images.
FraxHD is a fun program. The free version is easy to use. You can look at different fractals and "fly" over them to find an interesting pattern, which you can then save and reuse. Here is one that I will use for the "veil."
Here I used Style/Tensor preset 5 with the fractal as the secondary input. Tensor 5 lets you distort an image through another image, as if the top image were changed into transparent glass, through which you can see the bottom image.
I used Effect/Blend to bring back the eyes from the original image. To do this, I brought up the brush mask bar, inverted the mask, and painted over her eyes. Don't remove the mask yet.
With the mask still in place, I used Adjust/Exposure to brighten her eyes. Now save and remove the mask.
I used one of the presets in Tone/Pastel to apply a color tint to the image.
I used Style/Coherence to smooth the image.
Using Brush/Paint and a small hard round brush, I painted catchlights in her eyes.
The above version is nice, but I kept going to add a bit of Metabrush texture to the face. As a clean simple base for texture, I used this photo from Pixabay.
I opened the above photo in Metabrush and painted using a variety of brushes, including the first Kanji brush, and Doodle brush 22/71. In the brush settings, I used a large separation, a large size variation, and large rotation variation. Look here for more on brushing in Metabrush.
Opening the above image in iColorama, I used Adjust/Tonelab 4 to get some depth, and Effect/Raise for some definition of the Metabrush strokes. I saved.
Now I opened the woman image again in iColorama. Using Effect/Distort, I distorted the Metabrush image over the woman.
I used Style/Coherence to smooth the image. This is almost always necessary after using Effect/Distort.
I applied Effect/Raise for some definition.
Since there was clearly too much texture now, making the image too busy, and since I was striving for having the texture appear to be on her face, underneath her transparent "veil," I used Effect/Blent to blend the Tensor 5 image over the work in progress.
As a final touch, I lightened the whites of her eyes. It is easy to do this using Adjust/Levels, increase Gamma by moving the slider to the right, bring up the brush mask bar, invert the mask, and start painting on the whites of her eyes.
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