Siti Zahara is the mother of the boy-hero Kalifa. When I was writing the script I had no visual idea of her looks except that she is wearing a black hijab. But emotionally I could feel her with my words though in real life I could not relate anyone like her. Only after watching the film ‘Lion of the Desert’ I came to realize that the character that played the little boy’s mother matched Siti Zahara perfectly.
I grabbed a number of frames of her head shots and molded her face in Poser as close to her features but not to duplicate her looks exactly. The base figure is Alyson a Caucasian which I morphed it into an Arab and became Siti Zahara.
I also used the same hijab design as in the film which is two piece. One is over her head and shoulders and the other is tied over and around the head with the knot at the back. The front neck is exposed because the situation in the script demanded it. The scene was in and near her house and she was dressed moderately. All the modeling was done in 3DS Max which can be quite frustrating with this kind of organic modeling
The morphing of her face is not that difficult if one was trained in sculpting or life drawing. It is just a matter of using the source as reference and manipulate your work accordingly. The facemap then need to be redrawn in Photoshop because it is not possible to paint directly in Poser. The main focus area is the eye makeup because Arab women have a certain way of doing their eyes. The process needs both software to be run simultaneously. The painting is in 2D but the facemap is in 3D. That will make most artists feel disorientated trying to shuttled between the two dimensions.
The draping of Siti Zahara was more challenging than Abu Musa’s. The thobe of Abu Musa uses a dynamic cloth which behaves like a real cloth that conform to gravity, collision and external forces like wind which means all the folds and creases are decided by the software. Siti Zahara’s thobe also uses dynamic cloth but her hijab is not. If I use dynamic cloth for her hijab it will loose all the folds that I modeled originally in 3DS Max because it will fall flat against her body. I have no other choice but to use conform clothing which wrap around her like a molded plastic. It will not conform to the law of physics but it will deformed accordingly to the poses of the character. Any imperfection will be corrected by my drawings.
By now I hope my artist friends would understand what I am getting at. It is not about free hand drawing or tracing or cheating. Art is a process and expression. Foremost it is has to be original because that constitute an intellectual property.
