I've had a few people ask how I go about creating a manip - here's peak at my working practices (doesn't that sound grand?).
First I choose a group shot that suits the particular group of people I'm trying to manip, or an individual if it's an individual. My current piece is going to be a group shot of Generation X so I took a cd cover of pop group Liberty X as a basis.
I then recreate the figure over the top, creating costumes and props to suit. The body is frankensteined together, the base pic seldom usedbeyond getting a position for the figure. As you can see from Monet I changed just about everything but the basic pose.
For Jubilee I changed just about everything. Once the foreground figure is in place I can work around them and wanted to have Jubilee in her trademark yellow mac. Finding just the base pic I wanted for the mac was very hard and I played around trying to bastardise a coat from various sources, with no luck, as you can see from the first attempt.
Finally I found a better pic and scrapped what had gone before, coming up with a Jubilee I liked. The final figure has no relation to the original base pic at all in this instance, beyond being used as a rough guide for proportions.