My Mother's Face (Digitally Modified Photo)

My mother was born on November 2, so today I hoped to post an image of her, as I usually do. But  there was a lot going, so I knew I wouldn't have a lot of time.  Late this afternoon, I finally found a photo to start with, a full-length view of my mother as "Matron of Honor" at my Aunt Edy's wedding. (This was taken sometime in the 1940s and the photographer was Raoul Turner, of Pueblo). I thought I would just add a little Prisma* filter using the app on my phone,  but most of the usual filters didn't look good on this photo, especially not on her face. So I decided to try one of Prisma's portrait filters and chose one called "Leya". It automatically cropped the full-length photo (rather awkwardly) and applied a kind of cubistic style to her face.  I thought the filter was way too angular, with slightly garish colors, but in spite of that, the likeness came through and caught the strength of her face in a way that was startling to me.  Wow. But I still, I thought the cubistic filter looked too harsh. But  I uploaded the image into my computer, opened it in Painter, and went to work.  I used some opaque digital pastel to soften places where I thought the Prisma filter looked awkward or the colors were unflattering.  I redrew a few lines that were off.  And I re-drew her shoulders completely because Prisma's automatic cropping had created an awkward composition, capturing just the top part of one rose from her bouquet and the top few inches or her gown.  I used digital pastel to replace all of that with a simple neckline, and used some strokes with square digital pastel to mimic the pattern used by Prisma's filter.  This isn't the full-length view that I wanted, and this isn't the image I imagined. But I am more than happy with the result because it reveals the beauty of my mother's face. To think that her whole life, my mother didn't know she was beautiful.

*Prisma uses AI, as do some of the tools I use in Painter, like Woodcut effect, and Posterizing.