Something for Auburn and Mona's "Ardhanarishvara"

[anna_luna]

For those of you who haven't read "Ardhanarishvara", it is a wonderful fanfic by auburnnothenna and monanotlisa, where an advanced alien civilization, in order to further enlighten their new business partners, had several members of Sheppard's team genderswitched.

Now this inspired a whole lot of fanart by me and other assorted people.

And now, since Mona's in the hospital and I'd like to make her feel a tiny bit better (if you want to make something for her, there is a community called ficformona), I made these:

Preview:



ETA: I have added a second version of the manip and the graphic after I followed some of icarusancalion's suggestions.



Original version:



New version:



Just the Manip.

I figured, maybe I was going about this business of genderswitching the wrong way: Instead of trying to make John into a woman, maybe I should be trying to make a woman into John. So I used a picture from 'Resident Evil II' and proceeded to give her some of John's features. I felt like a bit of a Frankenstein, adding the nose and the eyes, the shape of the face, the ear and of course, the hair.







This is from the bar scene in Part Eleven.

Comments

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I think you can be subtle. Rather than map Sheppard's lips onto her (he has full lips, especially for a guy), which, yeah I pictured it yesterday and went, ouch -- I would just broaden the dent beneath her nose and upper lip. With pastels I would just use the tip of my pinky and widen it.

Then I would go back to the model's original lower lip (on the original which you provided above). Her lips actually look more like Sheppard's than the photo-manipped version. You've gone for too much beauty and have lost some of the toughness that made you look at her pic and think "hey, that's Sheppard."

The eyes, you don't need to move them closer. I'm recommending a line that slightly changes the shape of the upper eyelid, as well as shading on the inner eye corner. Can you print out your photomanip and do some hand work, then scan it back in? These kinds of changes would be easier to render convincingly by hand and then soften and smooth in Photoshop.

Icarus