Medusa Fantasy Portrait

This was my fantasy portrait assignment for Digital Illustration.
(Our instructor Chris Nielson was the bomb!)
I found a photo of a Korean model named Lim Ji Hye online and absolutely loved her face and body language. I thought it would be great to use and Medusa just kinda popped into my head after that.
I did a sketch in photshop and brought it into Illustrator as a template.
From there the pen tool and pathfinder palette became my best friend.

Below you can see the original photo reference (bottom), the sketch (right), the outline view (middle) and the final product (far left).