Strange Paint Over Technique

Day 16 and 17
Soooo there was this technique in one of my collage books - and I wanted to try it.  You take a copy of a photo and paint over it to make it look sort of like a painting.  Sort of.

This first one was awful and gross.  But I learned a lot.  The directions said to use acrylic paint but that was too heavy and covered up all the details.  And the photo was printed in sepia which made it less clear.

So I tried again.  This time I used a slightly larger photo (5 x 7) , black and white, and used Inktense pencils with water instead of acrylic.

It worked better because you can see more of the details of the original photo.

Unfortunately I tried to make the little eyeballs look better and that did not work well.  Oh my.

So I picked a different photo.  I really like this photo.  I even like the way it turned out.

But - I don't really understand how this is better than just cutting out the main part of the photo and gluing it down to a background. 

barbara