Going into this creative composite project I knew I wanted to do two things: focus on color, and utilize cotton candy in some way. My original idea was to make it look as if a girls hair was made of cotton candy. As you'll see, that idea changed along the way. 

From sketching out some different ideas, I decided I really liked the idea of making it look like a girl was sitting in cotton candy clouds. After developing that idea a bit more, I decided I wanted to try and do this project of me - self portrait style. So I borrowed a tripod, bought some blue paper for my background and got my little living room studio all set up. As you can see in the next image, it was very DIY and rudimentary. 

Because I don't have a remote for my camera, I had to run from pressing the shutter, jump up on the boxes I'd set up and get in position in under 10 seconds. After doing that probably a hundred times, this is the final shot I decided to go with: 

I used the photos in Photoshop and masked out the table that I was sitting on, then used content aware and the healing tool to make the background larger, and get rid of the line down the middle of the paper background. 

I had taken a bunch of pictures of some cotton candy against the blue background as well, which you can see from this "behind the scenes" photo: 

I selected the cotton candy photo I wanted to use, and then added it into my image through masks in Photoshop. 

As I was editing, I thought I might like it better if the background looked more like a sky, so I tried it out with a photo I had taken a while back. This was that version:

I decided I preferred the original blue background better. I think that with the right sky picture, it could look cool, but the photo I had just wasn't the right one. 

I wanted the final image to look almost like a painting, so I added some blur/swirls to the background. I then took the photo into Lightroom to make some lighting adjustments. I brought it back into Photoshop, again, and added some shadows on the "cloud", as well as changed the cotton candy to cover my awkward looking hand. After all of the adjustments were done, I added an "oil painting" filter to add even more to the painting look that I wanted. This is the final image: