This is the Annapurna range in Nepal, given by a friend, and is the background for the image below. The sunlit areas were selected and reduced in brightness with a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer. Colour corrections were applied along with a few filters.. A gradient from two of the photo's bluey colours was applied and overlayed to unify the colours a little more and the layer opacity reduced.
One or two filters were applied to give more of a painted look and rough it up a little (crosshatch again). It was saved as a jpeg and imported into ArtRage where loads of paint was applied on top of the photograph and blended.
The face was gently and minimally smudged and a canvas texture applied to the boy image only. If the smudge tool was used too liberally, it tended to make the skin unnaturally smooth and similar to porcelain. As it is, some of the tones in his little cheeks has been lost and he is paler than he should be. But again there is an endearing patchiness about the original which I chose not to try and replicate.
I put back some lights in the eyes using a very small soft brush, adding both grey/white sampled from the surrounding whites and a little light blue sampled from the photo. I blew up the magnification to around 300% to examine the original and replace lights that were lost in the texturisation. The canvas-style texture cannot be seen as clearly online, partly because the quality has been reduced in compression.
The lighting down the left side of the figure had to be modified to fit with the light direction in the rest of the image.
I used brushes from a web source, a link on the Innographx site with a smudge tutorial.