Here's how I do mine.
Make a long(ish) barrel shaped bead. At the top and about half way down put an extra wrap or three of glass. Heat and shape with the edge of your marver into something resembling two cones (so shoulders to waist is one cone, hips to knees the other). Squish flat with your mashers, you've now got two triangles. Heat so everything rounds out nicely, you don't want pointy hips, much nicer with a layer of padding.
Next is the contours and other detail. Add a couple of shoulders on either side, heat them well in so they don't look like blobs attached. You can use your marver again here to straighten up the shoulders and top of the bead if you want to. Add two blobs below the shoulders, two blobs on the other side halfway down, back up to the first two blobs and add a bit more. Heat everything so those blobs are well attached and aren't sitting proud at all. Get some heat and gravity on the bigger blobs to shape them how you want your boobs. Heat the back of the bead and with a knife or something similar mark a line all the way down the centre back, for spine and between legs. Then heat the bum blobs and make a line with the knife sideways to define where the bum is undercut (sorry, it's the easiest way to describe it). If you have a more portly woman she'll probably have rolls of flab down her back at the sides, you can mark these with the knife as well.
Front. Make sure you haven't heated her boobs together, you can always seperate them with your knife, but they look better if they're not melted together. You need to heat the lower front half of her and mark the Y for her hips and legs, then heat her tummy and give her a tummy button with the end of a mandrel. The final step is to give her some nipples with some stringer, be careful though it's really easy to melt this too far in.
Variations.
Make a dumpy goddess by making a bicone rather than the two cone initial bead.
Give her smaller boobs, incredibly large boobs, a bigger or smaller bum.
Give her a bit extra padding in the tummy (though these don't look that good if they're not melted in properly, my opinon, but someone bought her so they obviously didn't agree with me).
Bigger, smaller.
Decorated.
Hole through shoulders rather than down middle (though this is A LOT harder as you can't swish round the bead so easily).
Add a neck.
Extend the legs to below the knee.
Make a core of different coloured glass and encase and do all the sculptural work with clear (a thin lady fighting to get out of a fat lady's body).
There's as many different variations as there are women in this world.
Bombay sapphire goddess beads by
HelenPetersBeads, on Flickr
Chris' goddesses by
HelenPetersBeads, on Flickr
I've been somewhat obsessed with them recently so there's loads of pics on my flickr and Etsy shop.
