Halloween

Very creative

Great photo. Superb even. Can you share how you came up with it Nigel please?

Flattery will get you everywhere. Thank you for the compliments I am very pleased you approve of my effort, I would say "Superb" is perhaps a bit more than it deserves.
Once more it is an image of myself doing the modelling, I tried using someone else but I was struggling to get them in the pose I wanted. As always having an idea of the end image you desire is vital for this kind of shot but allow yourself to remain flexible as one progresses.
I'm just in my garden with the sun behind me to gain a silhouette from the start, I've taken away all behind me, fairly thoroughly for my top half more slapdash for the bottom half, you can still see bits of branches and paving slab joints, I didn't want the silhouette to be all hard edged. I wanted to appear both as if coming from the ground and reaching forward towards the viewer. With a brush I drew the sort of skirt shape going to the ground and simply burnt it down, a lot of the removed details are in fact just using a brush over those parts of the photo and dodging, over exposing to white. The long fingers, hair/energy field, eyes and mouth where drawn in/stretched and so on in Coral Paintshop pro, some might say "digital art "better describes the photo but most is just a single photo.
I now have this crazed witch/monster created on a white background. I then used something I've never tried before, I used one of the Widows image viewer presets to create the tone and vignette.
As with my day job I try not to get too bogged down in technicalities, rights and wrongs, just trying to create the end result I want, the methods whilst important tend not to dominate my work.
I hope that I've given the sort of information you wanted.
Best regards
Nigel

And then some. I can see how much the final result depended on your starting concept, and then realized by thinking through the photo setup followed a heavy pp. What I thought was mostly a multi-photo merge was accomplished instead by pp tools. Quite a performance. Thanks for the learning opportunity.