This was an experiment to see how Freehand handled loads of lens and gaussian blur effects. The gradients on the girl (minus the texture and highlights on the dress and strappy bits) were all done in Freehand. If you've used Freehand before, then you'll know that's quite a bundle! Anyway, the real test was the export bit. The results were very agonizing - the first export of an A4 300dpi file of just the girl took probably over an hour. A large 30x40" 150dpi file took a few hours, and that didn't turn out right. In the end I exported the file as a 600dpi A4 file, which surprisingly scaled up pretty well indeed.
The background was added in Photoshop. Initially I wanted her over a bed but that didn't look too good in the end.
I'm not totally happy with it, I think the pose is a bit off, but it's a bit too hard to tweak at this stage so I'm just leaving it as it is. Perhaps when I have time in the future I'll do a part 2 or something.