This is the final image.
My original concept for the image was of a miniaturized "me" swining from a rope in the abyss of my room. However, I have evolved from that idea to this concept. If I had continued with that concept however the output may have looked a little bit like this:
That is pretty fail, but it was an idea and I wanted to stick with the motif of an escaping artist. The foreground, which I refer to as a "Cheeto forest" is actually a picture of my human hair. I used numerous tools to make it seem like I was emerging from the forest: clone stamp tool, polygonal lasso tool, quick selection tool, brush, eraser, blur, etc... Eventually I got to the end result and added some gradient to increase the light and a rope to reach for.
These are the variations.
