Disney Coloring Book Pages, WIP's

(Do I ever post anything that isn't a work in progress?)

All this time I thought that other digital painters must have some secret that they weren't sharing with me.  I thought I couldn't make the really pretty stuff because I didn't have the right program or whathaveyou, but it turns out I'm just stupid.  It's called 'Flow', and it's a brush setting in Photoshop, and all this time I thought it was just another way to say 'Opacity'.  It's not.  *facepalm*

I recently found a really amazing digital artist on Deviant Art.  Her painting style is just gorgeous.  It's all big brush strokes and texture, and I love it.  Anyway, I was going through her stuff and she wrote a bunch of FAQ/tutorial things, and one of them was what brushes she uses, and it was there I learned about 'Flow'.  So I've been trying to mimic her style all weekend to figure out how she does it.  So far I'm an epic fail.  I see chunky brush strokes and my brain goes, 'Gah!  Soft edged brush now!  Smooth that out!'  So that part isn't going very well, but I'm learning stuff through failure, which is a plus.

I've been trying things out using the painting exercise shown above.  You take a Disney coloring book page - Choose your favorite princess! - and you paint it in the style of some work of art.  It's fun and pretty silly, but I've seen it done with impressive results.

I started out this exercise with Jasmine, as I attempted to turn her into a Degas ballet dancer (in the coloring book page she's holding this length of sheer fabric, and I thought it might work), but my digital painting skillz aren't up to imitating Degas, so I gave up.

I moved onto Ariel and Eric.  I'm painting them in the rococo style (you can see the painting I'm drawing from here: Francois Boucher's Venus Consoling Love), because this pose screams 'rococo' to me.  I'm actually really excited about this one.  I don't think it's very accurate as far as being rococo goes, but I think it might turn into a cartoonish version of it.  And anyway, Ariel's hair looks fantastic.

I only started on Alice this morning, because I wanted to try the eye thing.  She's going to be the creepiest version of Alice I've ever seen.  The only part of her that's 'done' is her eyeballs, though I think I need to make the inner part of her irises darker...  But she'll be fantastic and weird when I'm through.