Y'all know how I love to draw a ballpoint portrait of Aaron Tveit 😅 I found this photo saved on my iPad when I was clearing it out and realised that I'd meant to draw it way back. I actually find drawing portraits a good way to unwind, and I like to stay on top if my skills. In the past I've either focused exclusively on realism or exclusively on illustration and then gotten frustrated when I've lost skills in the other.
I am often asked if I'll do portrait commissions, and I'm afraid the answer will always be no. It's something I do for fun and it's difficult for me to put my heart into it when I don't care about who I'm drawing, which is why I draw the same people over and over. It's also why I stopped sharing my portraits for a long time as I didn't want to create a business of it and get stuck drawing strangers.
Dmitri and Anya from Anastasia, they'll be coloured digitally at some point. I wanted them to be similar in style to my Wicked illustrations, with the background elements specific to each character. Dmitri is in St Petersburg, and supposed to look like he's casually playing with the music box by throwing it from hand to hand - I was really stumped with how to pose him, and this was the first character illustration I'd done like this in a long while so I felt like I was getting back into it. Anya came much easier, and it shows in her more natural posing and flow. Pooka is perhaps too small, but eh. There's the sign in the background where she meets her crossroad - one pointing to St Petersburg, one to the Fishermans Market where she's been given a job out of the orphanage. It's a pivotal moment for her, so it felt like the perfect backdrop. I just changed the writing to Cyrillic because that's the one thing that bothers me about the movie - in all of the Russian locations, all of the background writing is in English and I think it's details like that that can really solidify a setting - or not in this case. Especially as I watch the film with Russian audio so it's even more jarring!
I got some new Copic markers and wanted to try them out, so I sketched this based on a publicity photo of the London production of Wicked. I love this scene in the musical because it's so short but so telling of how the distance between Glinda and Fiyero is growing.
Another sketch to be coloured digitally. I've always liked the movie The Little Mermaid but it's never been my favourite, but it's really growing on me lately. I'm at a point in my life that I can relate to Ariel more, and that feeling of being stuck and yearning for change and the freedom to be who you want to be. Which isn't a million miles from why I relate so strongly to Elsa, who is my favourite, and they're both obviously Hans Christian Andersen characters so I thought I'd create a little homage to that.
Hans looking suitably pissy which is my favourite way of drawing him, and I tried to add some little historical details to his outfit as I've fallen down a rabbit hole of watching historical costumers on YouTube and those videos showing what the princesses would look like historically accurate. No one ever does the princes or focuses on male historical fashion which is a shame I think, I'm almost tempted to try and perhaps create a little series of them myself. And a ballpoint portrait of Mika, my other fave who I draw all of the time! I want to try and translate him to my illustrative style some time and see how it works, as he is very distinctive so wouldn't be that difficult.
I don't know if I've mentioned about it on this blog before, but when I was doing my foundation degree I created a whole illustrated book of the original tale of The Snow Queen. I found the original book I'd created when I was clearing through stuff to move and it felt a bit cringey to me now as my skills have developed so I decided to update it. I'll go into it all in more detail when I've finalised and digitally coloured some of them, but these are some of the rough sketches I'm working with right now. I'm super excited for how they're coming out! I obviously don't want it to reference Frozen as it's such a different story even if it is what inspired it, but as I'm such a fan of Frozen I have thrown in little 'easter eggs' here and there, such as basing elements of Kai on my design of Hans - I made a big post on my personal blog about how I feel Hans is an interpretation of Kai anyway, so it fit. It won't be too obvious where you think "OK that's Hans", but enough to link the two when you think about it.
I've been drawing so much that I had to buy a new sketchbook! I've nearly finished my Leuchtturm, which is a shame as they're my brand of choice and not easily available here. I picked up a Handbook Travelogue Journal which I've been intrigued about for a while, and got the watercolour edition as I'm really enjoying painting lately. I've already begun, but you'll see more of that soon!
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