Have anyone read "signal to noise" by Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean? In it, the main character has an entire wall of old photographs hes collected over the years. He uses the faces on the photos to lend personas to the characters he writes.
That was exactly how I created this character, I looked at a photo on my wall(actually its a printout of a painting) and built my character from her. Its all about fragments, you cant build someone from nothing, you always need something as a conerstone.