Some time ago, Kap (a fellow photoshopper, whose battle with me can be seen here and here), Zamhar (my lecturer) and I had this conversation: who would be the best local actress to play Wonder Woman. Kap and Zamhar both thought of the same person: Maya Karin.
As for me, I had another person in mind. considering Maya’s age and Wonder Woman’s Amazonian figure i need to choose someone more voluptuous. So I thought of Zahida Rafik, simply because of the following Facebook conversation with Chef Wan (Facebook privacy was way lenient back then).
Recently, I stumbled across this awesome image of a female Captain America. The battle damages, crossed face, power stance, it was awesome. I immediately searched for the whole team. And oh boy did I find the jackpot.
It was a work from Fan Art Exhibit, a site dedicated to the author’s fan art of mostly comic characters. I really thought that this was a photo shoot, given that the whole thing looks real.
Then there was a post with a video about the steps he took to make one of his earlier designs. That grabbed my attention, I shall do one with local celebrity.
Choosing was simple. Remember the reason I chose Zahida Rafik? Using the same principle and the fact that Diana / Wonder Woman should be in her mid 20’s, and the actress needs to be voluptuous, I chose Neelofa.
So the project begins with some Google searches for the things that I may need. for the first phase I’ll need to add Neelofa, or also known as Lofa’s face to someone with a voluptuous body and wearing a bikini, since if I can find her photos in a bikini then it would also be all around the news.
I only used Lofa’s face and a bit of her hair and superimposed it to a photo of Kim Kardashian. had to adjust the hair around more than i would like. Most of the work actually goes to the hair, since I want the bangs Neelofa has to be in the final product. the colour was off and the styling are different, so a little bit of modification had to be done.
The next phase is to get her into some clothes. I wouldn’t mind her in a bikini but Wonder Woman has her own outfit. So next would be her chest plate.
Another Google search lands me in Zigorc’s Deviantart gallery. His work is awesome, those he has might as well be a prop from the actual movie (maybe it is!),
This one is kind of straight forward. The chest plate is supposed to be rigid so it already have the bust shaped into it. So I just place it infront of Lofa/Kim’s breast and overlay her hair over the chest plate.
Zigorc also made the belt worn by Wonder woman, so similar to the chest plate, I simply need to align and place the belt to Lofa/Kim’s abdomen.
Connecting these two is the corset, and for that I took the shortcut. there’s already an available corset with designs I don’t need to alter much, and I go with that. Maybe if there’s a need I will work my own design.
Next is a tricky part, especially considering that I don’t want it to be just a blue hot pants with stars, I would like it to be like in the photo below where someone (haven’t found the source yet) did for Cobie Smulders with some gladiator theme, and it looks awesome.
Alas! my skills are not that good, especially when it’s already 3am in the morning, so I settled with a pair of short jeans (edited to remove pockets and such), overlays it with stars, and then used a skirt from a female gladiator’s outfit.
At this time, I’ve already halted work on this out of exhaustion. But when looking back at this photo, Lofa seems normal and not like a Superheroine, much less
Wonder Woman. Then I realised the problem. I forgot the bracelet, the rope and the tiara.
After consulting with my friend Google, I found the ones that fits my bill. The bracelet is actually a product photo of a jewelery store and the tiara was found in a costume online shop. There’s only one fully visible arm so this was easy.
The tiara, however, needs extra work. Kim’s and Lofa’s hairstyle actually overlaps the tiara no matter how I did it. So in the end, I had to move Lofa’s real hair around to find the sweet spot on the head.
Before I forget Wonder Woman is not whole without her lasso. I found a lasso online, which was a costume, but it still works.
I
Cheers!!!
p/s: I’ll add battle scars if I have time.