Airedale, judging from what I see of your work, I would hardly say that my bumbling around is better than you could ever do.
I hope you carry on as I want to see what you end up with. It's fun to see folks making things in anim8or, and putting the program to its fullest use regardless of the limitations we all face.
I do hope you are alright with me joining in, because this looked like a challenging little project with things I would like to see if I can accomplish as well. I am showing all this in the hopes that you will carry on with your fine work, and see if any of these tips/techniques might be of interest to you, and see if you have any ideas that I might learn from as well.
I want to see your work come to full circle and take a great final shape.
All that said, I think the only thing I've really done a bit more of so far would be in my work with the legs:
Leg Cylinders: I created a basic vertical cylinder wider at the bottom. The bottom/sole of the leg cylinder is filled, while the top has no face, is open-ended.
Feet/Shoes: I converted the leg cylinder into mesh and "cut faces" on the lowermost part of the leg cylinder to make a rough shape of the shoe - forming the upper front/toe area, sole and heel. When cutting out the heel, I lost the sole faces, so went underneath and reconnected them, drawing in vertices as necessary to reshape and fill in the faces, and restore the solidity of the bottom of the shoe. I then selected the points in the forward area of the shoe and stretched them forward more to accent the foot shape a bit and make it more pronounced than the main leg, distinguishing the shoe. Finally, I selected faces of the shoe sections (see the attached "SnapShot 1" and the colors of the areas I grouped), "extrude connected" them in groups doing the heel/sole sides together (orange), the main shoe and upper "strap together (green), and the front crscent spot above the toe (lavendar). At this point they look tightly connected, even though each area has a face-gap between the other areas that is simply flush to the neighboring selected/raised area. This is important in the final "form change" effect.
Warping Leg: Using the Modifier button to first "curve" and then "bend" the leg, experimenting with the rate of curve and bend to get the form, and rotating the object to keep it in a decent standing position, foot flat to the ground.
Final Leg and Shoe Shaping Technique: To give the leg its final "nice shape" and accentuate the shoe, I went to "Build/Subdivide Faces" and used the default values, bringing out the accents in the shoes. Since the shoe and leg area now had a slope for the transition from one to the next, I selected the points at the top of the "slope" and pulled them down below the upper rim area of the show, which createda nice effect of the leg/foot slipping into the shoe. If you look at "SnapShot 2" you will see the area that overlaps at the top of the shoe, and how I pulled those points/vertices that were originally above the show line down beneath to give that nice "in the shoe" effect.
Now that the base leg is in shape, time to make left and right... so, I pulled the leg to left of center of the work area, rotated it for a pigeon-toed effect... Stocking's artwork indicates that she is pigeon-toed as they often do with this type of anime... and I mirrored the leg, resulting in a nice left and right leg in proper pigeon-toed pose.
Am unsure about how to best fix these legs for flex and bend at knees, but think I have an idea and need to experiment. Nevertheless, it seemed appropriate to turn them in and such as part of the base model, and then adjust bones, etc., accordingly to adapt to the natural inward-turned pose later.
I might be wrong, but will see and learn the hard way.
