it's true... I saw it on the discovery channel.

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Photoshop 7... still - on her "awkward" anatomy... I can promise this piece wouldn't be what it is if it weren't. Like I told my friend, people will either get it or they won't... the gangly bit wasn't something I thought I would have to explain. If her legs were all perfect and her arm not weighed down by the worlds heaviest ice cream... wouldn't be much fun.
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I had worked on this last weekend, then this weekend. Today I had put in about ten hours, saved a few times, and for whatever reason Photoshop crashed my computer and when the computer rebooted and I opened the file I noticed almost all of my work from the day was gone... don't know if that's happened to you before, but it almost made me want to toss this all together.

Anyhow, references used on my flaming guy here, as well as textures/designs for her dress and jean texture.
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I'll make a tutorial for the bubbles someday. You want a quick verbal one, here goes:

1) Get Elliptical Marquee tool
2) make circle > rightclick and stroke -with some kind of darker colour you can use dodge on in a moment- *mnn*
3) Depending on how you paint, either fill the bubble above or below the circle with any colour (I used green and pink for mine here)
4) Merge the two layers together if they're not already one.
5) Use dodge on two sides of the bubble (you can see where I did mine easily in this painting)
6) smudge the edges so they're no longer the perfect stroke
7) add some other colours (I use softlight for these) and smudge them in as well...

Probably the easiest "real" looking thing you'll ever make.