What I did:

 
So, after some thought on the theme, I remembered my old favourite TV program from the 90s... "Reboot" ... The characters all lived inside a computer Mainframe (the name of their world) and the "Internet" was a great mystery to most inhabitants. There were two characters that were actually viruses in the mainframe - the bad guys - called Megabyte and Hexadecimal.

Megabyte was your typical power-seeking bully bad guy but hexadecimal was much more interesting... She was more like the Joker from "Batman"... Insane, unpredictable, motivations completely obscure... ;P ... When everyone was supposed to like Bob, the main hero, my favourite was Hexadecimal XD

So I decided to do a portrait of her... First, I found a heightmap of a face. I then found her face (nothing too crazy and believe me she had many crazy expressions with that mask of hers):

I used her face only to cut out the shapes of her eyes, nose and lips... I also used the smudge tool to manipulate the heightmap into the shape of Hexadecimal's head, and "thinned down" the features a bit. It was all experimental, having never done this before:

Next, I needed to reign in the heightmap hair with the smudge tool:

And continued smudging it all the way up into Hexadecimal's medusa-like spikes... And then used the smudge tool to raise certain parts of the heightmap, again not sure of what I was doing but hoping it would come out nicely when I imported it in Mandelbulb 3D:

And, success! :

The colours were next... I had to use several layers with different colours for the forehead, face, eyes, neck and lips:

But before getting to this point, as you can see above, there is a background. I used JSPlacement to create this heightmap:

Which I then added to the image by putting it in a back layer and erasing the face layer with opacity down low (12%). I then had to choose the colours (I went with a slightly more intense type of sepia because the face is already pretty crazy) and then toned it down even more with a few different types of blurring, after which I "cut it up" with selection and changed the hue of those parts slightly:

I wanted it to seem as though she was emerging from the circuitry (some part of the background heightmap are merged with her face) but the colour distinctions reduce the effect, unfortunately.

Thank you very much to Julia, as usual, for hosting this contest... Doing something so different is such a pleasure and only possible because of contests like these.

Thank you for your upvote 💖
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A few recent posts of mine:
"Boiled Logic" - Gallery: Fine Art | "Luz Solun" | Gallery: Motifs | "Biosynthetic Leaf: A Study" - dIFS Pong #015
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All images, copyright @mandelsage - All rights reserved. (Except television screenshot image of Megabyte and Hexadecimal)