i painted my self portrait using mostly the circle brush (with shape dynamics, scattering, and other dynamics turned on) and my custom skin brush (and custom ink brush for the background). i used a low opacity setting for most of the brushes to build up multiple layers of overlapping colors.
the top brush is a skin brush, made from circles of different size and opacity.
the bottom brush is an ink and water brush, made from scans of several ink washes overlapping.