Reluctant bride?

This image is actually skipping ahead a little bit in the order of creation (which is a fancy way of saying it's not in chronological order anymore). This image was one of my more technical works, where I learned a crazy amount about both Photoshop and the human body. Not to sound weird, but I know how faces work a LOT better after having done this Photoshop. The problem with the initial image I decided to work on was that it very clearly was not a real image. Well, I'm not sure if the person in the image is real, but the image clearly went through some editing. Just like in the book "The True Meaning of Smekday," I cloned a clone (or at least photoshopped a Photoshop). Since I did that, there was absolutely no way I could fool anyone into thinking this was a real image. The project then became about how natural I could make the image seem. It wouldn't seem realistic, of course, but hopefully it also wouldn't seem obviously altered, at least not at first glance. The second problem I ran into was the face. The face was the main issue with the image. I had to photoshop it onto the body but make it look realistic. There were a couple of problems with this approach. First, the face was a completely different color than the rest of the image! It wasn't in black and white, so I learned how to edit its color. The biggest problem with this plan was that I had to make the colors of the face match the colors of the skintone and lighting almost exactly. This took me a long time, and I spent too long thinking one skintone matched when it did not. The second problem with the face was the face shape. The girl in the image has a completely different face shape than the face I found! I realized it was unrealistic to expect that I'd be able to find a face that matched her face shape perfectly. Instead, I had to shade the areas of her original face that were showing around the new face. This proved to be quite a challenge. I did not know how face shading worked, because, it turns out, I didn't know how faces worked. My artsy friend was like "the shadow WOULD NOT be there" and I was like "okay, I see what you're saying but also what??" Eventually, though, I figured it out. Then came a problem that took me a long time to figure out (mostly because I got frustrated and put the project down for a few weeks). The problem was the hair. See, the hair on the original image works very well with the face since it's, you know, actually part of the same person's head. When I changed the face, though, the hair looked completely unnatural. Through a mix of copying and pasting, using the clone stamp tool (which is both very helpful and very very unreliable), and blurring it (not to mention a ton of brute force), I managed to make it look kind of okay. It's still not 100%, but it's definitely improved. Overall, though, this project taught me a lot about how to use Photoshop in a more professional and polished way (a.k.a not having twenty layers all doing the same thing).