Something about my process for "The Night Dance":

The background image was taken at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois.  Every year, running from November to January, the "Arb" puts on a light show around and near Meadow Lake.  The light show is called Illuminations.  The crowds can be unbelievable but I was fortunate enough the first year it opened to go with the Morton Arboretum Photographic Society and staff of the Arboretum.  It was a cold night but the novelty of lights in the forest, music on loud speakers that was timed to the changing lights, kept all of us photographing for a couple of hours.  

The model here is Nabila.  She consented to posing at a business complex building where the organizer of the Meet Up group set up lights and a backdrop in the lobby.  The top portion of the dress you see here was a black tunic she wore with pants.  I wanted to change the color to brown in order to make the scene subtle in color, trying to keep within two prominent hues: brown and red.  Using one of the shots from the photo shoot, I placed her into the scene using layers in Photoshop.

The dress was built directly on the image of the model using layers of fabric cutouts and shaping it into a dress form.  Photoshop's transform tool works well for this.  I roughly created 10-12 layers.  Once the dress was complete, I moved on to the shawl that appears to be flying away from the model.  Two pieces of fabric was stretched (warp, distort, etc.) into shape.  ParticleShop has some wonderful plug-in brushes.  All the white feathery embellishments you see on her dress was applied using one of the plug-in brushes.

To finish off the composition I simply added a second background and masked off parts of the dress and shawl to create some depth.