The Bearded Woman

Starting to play around with textures and making her clothing look like less of a blob, giving her some fingers and thinking about what software to render with. I'm a little apprehensive about what software to transfer and render with purely based on the fibermesh hair. Whilst I can export to curves, they're not supported in each software (i.e Substance Painter and Unreal engine). I want to use as little steps as possible, and ultimately, I just want a nice render!

I'm happy with the hair, I think I'll keep it this way, I'm debating making the beard bigger or even styling it with a goatee so I can play with beard jewellery; but for now I'm happy with this.

The concept of a bearded woman is much more challenging than I first thought - after all, we physically identify a woman as a woman for more than just her breasts, especially in today's society. It's interesting to teeter-totter on the balance of gender, as the very concept of a beard is deemed as a masculine feature, so I have to do my best to not lose her femininity in that, as she isn't a drag queen, nor transgender. At the same time, I don't want her to be hyperfeminine in pink with a pronounced curvy figure, either: I just want to portray a regular everyday woman, with a beard.

I do look forward to giving her makeup though...

It got to a point where I realised... she was looking really glum! I imagined her sitting down having her photo taken, and thinking of it further, she's condfident, she's young, and I decided I wanted her to smile. It adds to the humanness, too; which ultimately I'm trying to achieve. 

I'm very excited with where this is going so far! I decided to go ahead and start grooming the hair since it's such an important part and no detail on the base sculpt will take away from that. Also, her not having eyebrows was really throwing me off!!

I still have a lot of question marks on this piece: Her jewellery, her dress, whether I'm happy with her pose, how much makeup, her hairdo and I'm pretty sure that I'm only going to have more questions as I continue. So I'll keep gathering references and take it one step at a time.

I had a little play around with some very early sculpts to see what kind of features I wanted to include. I want her to be racially ambiguous, but I'm taking inspiration from Indian and Romany Gypsy cultures in terms of dress, features and grooming. I realise putting these together that I'm swaying more to what I originally sketched out in terms of composition. More of a side profile with her hair up will give some breathing room to jewelry. I don't want to overwhelm or complicate things!

I'm going to be going with 'The Bearded Woman' as my inspiration; and the taboo has come so far! To think that back then, something as simple as an imbalance of hormones could have you sent off to showmen at the tender age of one. Now, we have women actively growing and flaunting facial hair as a style choice, both real and fake. My idea is going to be based on bearded women being presented in a candid light, simply being herself.