Previous Entries in This Series
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
It was getting on the fourth week in a row with no new instructional videos from Ady Almanza even though she’s been uploading to her Facebook account new art that she has been working on (some are works in progress while others are either complete or nearing completion).
I began to wonder about this tutorial series so I posted a polite note on her Facebook page asking if there will be more tutorials in the series or if they were going to have only the three tutorials that she has already uploaded. (I thought she said that there were going to be 10 tutorials in all.) She responded promptly saying that she was on holiday but she will eventually get around to uploading the rest of the tutorials sometime in the near future.
I have to admit that she was very quick in her response. In the past I’ve dealt with other artists who either don’t reply at all or reply several weeks or months after you’ve sent an e-mail and, by that point, I’ve forgotten what I had written or why I even wrote to them in the first place.
So I’m just going to wait until she gets around to doing more tutorials. In the meantime I still have extra pages that I needed to fill (mainly because the children’s board book I chose to use has more pages than what Ady Almanaza has been using in her tutorials). So I decided to wing it with another two-page spread, this time dedicated to the Disney movie Frozen.
I’ve seen the movie when it was in theaters. I’ve bought it when it came out on DVD and I’ve watched it a few more times since. Yes, I like it. You might think that I’m fudging things a bit by using a movie instead of dolls in my Dolls Dreams Book. But I actually have two of the dolls based on that movie.
They are 1/6 scale dolls, which makes them around the same size as Barbie, Monster High, Ever After High, Volks Dollfie Plus, etc. As you can see, they are very gorgeous dolls, despite the fact that half of their outfits are molded and painted on their bodies so it would make changing clothes difficult at best. (Yet I found these in the toy department.) Elsa is somehow missing one of her shoes, which means I’ll have to do a search of my living room at some point. They are not only wearing the same outfits as in the movie but they are also wearing fancy crowns on top of their heads (which signifies the fact that they are royalty). I bought them at Target late last year because I thought it would be a cute idea to have two winter-themed dolls on display along with my Christmas decorations (which are mostly limited to just the coffee table in the living room). I originally intended to pack them with the other decorations once the holiday season ended. When it came time to pack everything away, I decided at the last minute that I couldn’t bear to pack away such pretty dolls in the attic and left them on the coffee table. (Yeah, I can be pretty lame at times. <LOL!>) By including art based on those dolls in my Doll Dreams book, I can say that there was a reason why I didn’t pack them away. Never mind the fact that I made that decision long before this online tutorial even existed. <LOL!>
Here are the two pages before I worked on them.
When it came time to work on this project, I had Anna and Else look at each other, just like in this next photograph.
Here is what the finished result looks like.
This latest art is a departure from the other ones in the Doll Dreams Book in that I decided not to use ink at all and I stuck with using just acrylic paint. I painted them as if I was taking a traditional painting class where students use paint only and no other media other than an H drawing pencil (which is used to lightly draw the shapes and other objects on the canvas before painting begins).
Since I painted this piece in August, where it’s usually hot and humid in the Washington, DC area, I pictured the background as being this hybrid between what the mythical kingdom of Arendelle looks like in the summer and what it looks like when Elsa decides to mess around with her winter-making powers. So I had Anna, who has no supernatural powers, standing in the summer area staring at Elsa, standing tall in her own personal winter wonderland on the other side.
I have to admit that while I enjoyed working on this piece, I also developed this obsession over working on it that bordered on insanity. I did the background first, which was no big deal when I quickly finished it on Monday night. When I was doing laundry on Tuesday, my original intention was to just work on the faces and save the hair, crown, and clothes for the following days. Well, something grabbed a hold on me and I began to become obsessed with working on it and working on it and working on it. I took breaks only to take out and put in new laundry loads. By late Tuesday night I found that I had finished about 99% of the piece. The following day I embellished the crowns with glitter glue, which was pretty quick. Then I started to do a few touch ups and I continued to find flaws while worrying about whether people would recognize it as Anna and Elsa to the point of paranoia.
At that point I finally remembered why I rarely do fan art. It can be quite stressful making sure that your interpretation of someone else’s work is still recognizable to others while putting your own unique touches on the piece without compromising the original artist’s vision. While I had fun working on the Frozen pages, it turned out to be time-consuming as well (which I didn’t anticipate).
I’m only glad that I’m using a relatively small book for this art. Had I decided to paint a separate canvas that’s 11” x 14” or larger, I would probably still be working on it to the point of almost total burnout.
I currently have three extra pages left that I can use to create art without relying on the tutorial video. If Ady Almanza resumes her video series, I’ll follow along to what she teaches. Otherwise, I’ll probably wing it again. I’ll know by Sunday what I’ll do. (She usually uploads new tutorials on the weekends.)
Subsequent Entries in This Series
Sagittarius Dolly 