Description from original post (created 2013-06-07 16:25):
Elastigirl (aka Helen Parr) is the super-hero wife of Mr. Incredible in the Pixar film "The Incredibles" (http://www.pixar.com/features_films/THE-INCREDIBLES-). This is my fourth skin in the_soup's skinning challenge (http://www.planetminecraft.com/forums/soup-skinning-challenge-t255600.html).
The_soup requested that participants in the challenge be creative and report back on what they learn. Here is my summary for this skin. I picked the Elastigirl character (http://pixar.wikia.com/Helen_Parr ) because the way she is animated hyper-accentuates the female body and I wanted to see if I could create that illusion on the blocky Steve template. Since Elastigirl does not wear a cape, have long hair, or wear a gown, I had to find another way to make her hour-glass figure and super-slender limbs seem plausible from various viewing angles. I started out using a base red color and just lightening or darkening the value to create a gradient that would represent curvature and shadows. This became problematic pretty quickly as the saturated red I started with became either faint pink or muddy as I worked on various parts of the skin. Here is what the skin looked like in its earliest stages:
While the character is recognizable in this early version, she lacks the saturation and "warmth" you would expect. The only solution that I could think of was to try hue shifting; something I have been avoiding on a serious scale because it is tricky to do well. I hue shifted red toward magenta for the shadowy areas or receding curvatures and toward yellow for the lighter areas and rising curvatures. I hue shifted the yellowish belt toward orange as it recedes from the middle of the belly toward the hips. For the black gloves, mask, and spandex bikini bottom, I used a dark blue and shifted it a bit. I left the boots black because I wanted to draw less attention to them as I was going to blend a grayscale negative space from them to define a shapely lower leg and thigh. A region of the body that caused me a lot of trouble was the negative space for the wasp waistline. I had two options to create the contrast I needed to pull off the illusion: either use shades of gray or lighter hues. Shades of gray had two drawbacks - they interfered with the gloves on the adjacent arm, and caused the side of the body to be ridiculously dark. The lighter hues offset the gloves and allowed me to reclaim the brighter tones on the sides of the body. It still looks a little odd to me.
The head presented its own problems. Elastigirl has a distinctly heart-shaped face which is hard to represent on a cube so I used her hair to frame a rough heart shape. Her hair strands are curved and sort of puffed out. That, coupled with the fact that I had gone with a realistic body design, made me feel that I couldn't go with a typical waffle pattern hair style - it would look too coarse and out of character. In the end I went with a variegated gradient.