It seems like we got almost halfway through the exercise without encountering any visual inspiration. Here’s one…
Everybody knows that you can change the proportions of the body (smaller hips for example) leaning towards the camera a certain way. Those distortions can look unnatural when overdone, but when over-overdone they transform a body in this abstract flow of lines. Take this example:
https://www.pinterest.ch/pin/538250592955628386/
It’s a person removing a t-shirt, but it’s also a dynamic and cool alive still life created with incredibly varied and dynamic object — the human body.
Here’s a bit more simple example:
https://www.pinterest.ch/pin/538250592955587890/
Here we don’t see the face of this girl, but it is still a portrait, reflection of her (or character’s) personality.
My point is, when you exclude this classic “model looking in the camera” paradigm, and maybe exclude the face all together, you are forced to work with more abstraction and there’s something really beautiful to be discovered there.