Great gift and the photo tweaked out nice.
If you haven’t played with painted surfaces yet, that photo looks ideal for a starter project.
Take an MDF (plywood should work the same) board and paint it a blue (I liked a darker blue - try some samples), then paint over that with a tan.
Once etched it will have a near flesh tone. Great effect.
@shogun had some amazing results and pushed me into the painted MDF rabbit hole. Sort of found the flesh tone by accident, but went nuts with it doing some ancestor pictures once it proved viable. Here is a link.