Mom in 1940 (Rescued Snapshot)

This morning I looked through some photos that my aunt sent me last year, taken from an album that my mother kept when she was a young woman.  This is before she met my dad and it is fun to see pictures of her boyfriends and see what she wore (she loved hats, who knew?) and find out about all the trips she took (mostly by greyhound bus).  But the one I liked best was a black and white snapshot of her, wearing a hat, and looking pensive.  The photo is labeled "M & M Restaurant - 1940" but I have no idea where this restaurant was or who took this picture. But I do know that she was 25 or 26 at the time. The snapshot needed some work because it was out of focus, off-center, and had some stray ink marks on it. So I decided to see what I could do with it.  I scanned it into the computer and straightened the image and did some light retouching in iPhoto.  Then I opened it in Painter and did some very careful hand drawing with digital pastel to remove an ink mark right above one eye.  I also fixed some stray strands of hair. (My mother was very particular about how she looked in photos.)  Then I used color overlays and digital pastel to add some color. I did some selective posterizing and then did a final crop to get this composition.  I am posting this today as a way of celebrating her birthday because she was born on November 2.