My Doll Dreams Book, Part 8

Previous Entries in This Series

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

Another week has gone by with no new tutorial videos from Ady Almanza. Since I had contacted her the week before and she responded quickly, I decided to just leave her alone and continue with winging it. I still had a few extra pages left (due mainly to the fact that the children’s board book I selected has more pages than the board book that Ady Almanza uses in her tutorials).

Last time I decided to do something with the two dolls that I have that are based on Anna and Elsa from the Disney movie Frozen and I became so obsessed with doing it (and doing it correctly so anyone viewing it would recognize who the two women are) that I ended up spending more time working on it than I intended. I also spent time working on the piece when there are other things on my life that I should’ve been working on but I ended up putting them on the back burner instead. I was also reminded that there was a reason why I rarely do fan art.

So what did I do this time? More fan art based on another Disney character. (LOL!) You may think that I’m a masochist but I learned a few things from the previous project so I decided on a different approach.

I have a doll based on Merida from the Disney/Pixar movie Brave. I bought her at the Disney Store just a few weeks after I saw Brave at the local movie theater. Like the other two Frozen dolls, Merida is also 1/6 scale, which makes her around the same size as Barbie, Ever After High, Monster High, Bratz, and other fashion dolls. The one defining characteristic of Merida is her long curly red hair that’s very unruly and wild. This is even noticeable in the doll version.

The details on this doll are impeccable. Notice the tiny freckles on her face and the Celtic design on the large silver button that closes her dark green cloak.

She even looks lovely from behind.

Here are the pages before I started working on them.

And here are the pages after I finished.

Like the previous Frozen art, I decided to use all acrylic paints with this piece. I also decided that I would just focus on an extreme closeup on her face while her unruly hair would literally cascade over two pages. That way, I could paint a simple background in one color. Merida’s hair was easy because, unlike the neat braids of Anna and Elsa (which were the most time-consuming part of the last project), I could literally cut loose with my brush and I did. I didn’t have to worry about neatness at all, which I found was very refreshing. I initially did an underpainting of dark red paint. As I added layers of lighter red paint, I would try to swirl it around with my brush in an effort of replicate her long curls. Ultimately I used a palette knife to render the curls because I found that the effect worked a lot better than just using a brush alone.

I used a smaller amount of glitter glue than on the previous pages. I mainly used it in a tiny corner where one can see a small triangle of Merida’s green dress with the gold trim. I thought about using glitter glue in her hair but I decided against it at the last minute because I found that using acrylic paint alone did a fine enough job of rendering the unruly curls in her hair. I also didn’t want to make the common artist mistake of not knowing when to stop creating something while continuing with adding more paint, more various types of media, and more special artist effects until the painting becomes something totally ugly, gaudy, and overdone. Personally I think it’s better to be understated in one’s art than to go totally overboard to the point of becoming an eye sore instead of eye candy.

I only have one more extra page left where I could wing it in order to fill all of the pages in the book by the time I finish with the last of the video tutorials. If Ady Almanza resumes her video tutorial series, I’ll do a final two-page spread then switch to just one page at a time for the rest of the tutorial series. If she doesn’t upload a video, I’ll just wing it with only one page. I won’t know until Saturday or Sunday (which is when she uploads her videos) at the earliest what I’ll do.

Subsequent Entries in This Series

Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12