Helioses

I logged in to deviantart and got two notifications that puzzled me.

First, it suggested (demanded?) that this needed to be marked mature. Now I have a lot of stuff here marked mature, but this one baffled me. Granted, the woman is undeniably gorgeous and her dress is tight fitting, but for mature audiences only??? You see far more explicit on billboards and buses nowadays. The only thing I can see that makes the picture out of the ordinary is that she has muscles. Are fit women so threatening that we need to protect the children and sensitive people from the disturbing idea that women going to the gym are going to be fit?? The way things are now, they are going to be upset alot since the trend seems to be strong is the new skinny.

Second, I got a message about this one.It had already been marked as moderately mature. But deviantart was suggesting that I reconsider my deviation and setting, because explicit content. The bikini is skimpy, but there are no naughty bits exposed. And the text is only innuendo. I can't figure out where the explicit bits are.

I'm confused.

The year was 1987. My interest in women with a muscular physique was really bubbling up to the surface, and lots of my hard earned allowance money was spent on bodybuilder magazines in hopes of getting the odd good pictorials of women bodybuilders. There was also a great ad campaign too for a weight gain supplement called Big. They used the talents of Boris Vallejo to create something that was mind blowing for me at the time.
The first ad I saw was this one:

 
A few months later, the next part of the ad series came out with this one:



And then there was a spark of inspiration. In these two pieces of art I saw a possibility. Fueled by excess hormones and powered by a pair of scissors, some tape and a piece of paper I created this (of course here I have recreated it by Gimp, but you get the drift):



And thus my first morph was born .
I guess this is my version of #puberme.

After making the morph DoA and a comment about watching bad movies with buff actresses and why, it got me thinking about a remarkable move and why it is so remarkable.

Most movies where there is a buff actress, it is usually a B, C or D movie (notable exceptions are Aliens and Terminator 2), but almost inevitably the actress' buffness is treated as a "thing", either as a joke, a plotline (usually about steroids), or that this woman is incredible dangerous (either as a hero or villain). If the actress is buff it is usually made a deal out of.

However there is one movie that truly breaks the mold: "Angela Bassett in "What's love got to do with it".

For some reason Angela Bassett put in an enormous effort into building an incredible impressive physique. The movie was released in 1993, but Bassett's physique puts her well into today's amateur fitness/physique competition levels, and wouldn't even look too out of place on the pro scale. She puts many of the pro fitness stars of the early 90's to shame, and by those day's standard she was high end amateur bodybuilding material.

So she had an amazing physique, so what? There were several movies around then with actual bodybuilders in them, like "Double Impact" (Cory Everson), and "Iron Eagle III" (Rachel McLish).

Well Bassett's movie is for starters a true A movie. That's something.

But what makes this movie truly remarkable is that Bassett's physique in this movie is a complete non issue. Bassett is just Tina Turner in this movie, not Buff Tina Turner. She wears her Tina Turner clothes (sometimes arms covered, sometimes not), does her Tina Turner things and no one bats an eye lid. It is treated as completely normal. Here's this incredibly fit woman, muscles bulging and rippling (when you can see them) and it is treated as the most normal thing in the world. I don't know why the director and Bassett went this direction, but I absolutely love it.

I wish some of the cuter fitness profiles out there (the likes of Cassandra Martin, Lauren Findley etc.) had acting talent while script writers, producers, casting directors and directors had the guts to put them into any role and never make a deal out of it.
One can dream.

Anyway, let's revel in some of Bassett's glory while we go down this memory lane:

pt 3 can be found here.

So now it's time to work on the arm. Back to throwing shit at the wall again


As you ca see, i picked a bunch with various degree of bent arms and showing triceps. The 4 top candidates are the two Pauline Nordin images and the two Timea Majorova images. The one of Pauline in jeans looks particularly promising, but since she doesn't have much definition there I'm not using it. The top picture of Timea looks promising too, but the resolution isn't good enough. The large image of Timea is quite promising but a part of her arm is missing. Speaking of her arm/hand, I've always wondered what she's doing with that hand that gives her that zoned out dreamy look in her eyes and that smile. But I digress. That leaves cage fighting Pauline for now.


So I make a rough cut of her arm and hide the rest of the layers in case i need them later on. I then trim a little better, rotate the arm and resizes it so elbow to shoulder matches Cece.


I then hide the background to I can precision trim the arm:


Then I bring the background up again and I use the joint bending technique again to make the arm match.


Not bad. It's hard to see that i messed with the arm. Attention to detail is important now. The arm matches pretty well, but it looks really photoshopped (besides the color mismatch) and it's becausr there is no shadow cast by the arm. Hide the new arm and copy a piece from the old arm


Paste the shadow on top of the new arm and adjust the position: 

Blur the edges with a large radius fuzzy eraser.


That's way better. The arm actually looks like it's on the table. Next on to fix the shoulder/blouse. Make a copy of the shoulder area and paste on top as a new layer and hide the background. Two reasons: this way gives you flexibility, and if you royally mess up, all you have to do is toss the layer away and both the arm and the background is kept pristine.


trim away everything around the blouse.


now resize the blouse to cover make it look like it is covering the arm. In Gimp this is the iwarp tool. 


Personally I think this is covering too much skin so I'll push the edge of the blouse up a little

Since the stretching blurred the edge of the blouse too much, I went in with an eraser to clean up the edge a little. I then bring up the background to see how this looks.


Getting there. The sleeve of the blouse looks a little off. I adjust it a little. make a layer below the blouse to spray paint in a little shadow, trim the edges a little and:


not perfect, but looks ok. If the overall composition of the image is drawing enough attention, it is incredible how many flaws get overlooked. If you have noticed, i also shortened the blouse a little.So o have to copy some of the background to cover theold edge of the blouse. I also decided to keep the old one piece thong swimsuit, so we need to go a little tummy tuck with the iwarp tool.


What's left now it pretty much just color matching.
I usually use the hue/saturation tool and try to do my best. Sometimes though the colors as just too way off and though the main color matches, highlights and shadows might turn weird. In those cases I just turn the picture into black and white. It usually solves the issues.
Here is the final picture. Came out all right I think.