The old way to do this was a Photoshop action — a texture layer, a smudge pass, maybe a paper overlay multiplied on top. It always looked like a photograph wearing a costume, because the underlying image was still a photograph. What changed is that the model repaints the picture rather than processing it: it decides where a brush would have loaded pigment, where it would have run dry, and where to leave the sheet blank.
That distinction shows up first in the background. A filter has to keep every leaf behind your subject, because it has no way to decide which ones matter. A painter drops them into two or three washes of green and lets the shapes go. So does this. If you have already tried the oil painting portrait tool, this is the same idea with the opposite physics — that one builds up opaque paint, this one lets the paper show through.
Watercolour is also the most forgiving style to try on a picture you would not normally call good enough. Harsh phone flash, a busy background, a slightly soft focus — all of it becomes wash. The technique hides exactly the flaws a sharper style like the AI sketch generator would expose.