Hey guys! In today's video I will be turning Beatrix Potter
into a cute anime character, while telling you some fun facts about her.
You may recognize some of her illustrations if you've ever read children's books.
She was known as an English writer, illustrator, natural scientist, and conservationist. As usual,
I will be using some basic shapes and lines to roughly sketch out the parts of her face.
After sketching in the basic shapes and lines, I'm going to put in her eyes, nose, mouth, ears, hair, etc.
Some fun facts you may or may not know about Helen Beatrix Potter;
known as Beatrix, she was born on the 28th of July, 1866. Potter and her little brother Walter Bertram,
who was six years her junior, both enjoyed to draw and paint. They both often sketch their varying
pets which included rabbits, mice, frogs, lizards, snakes, and a bat. Potter was always encouraged
to draw, and showed a love for nature and its beauty early on in her artwork. While she never
went to school, she was a very smart student. Her parents hired an art teacher named Miss Cameron
and multiple governesses that Beatrix remained close to throughout her life. After finishing
my line art, I'm going to create a new layer underneath this to color in. I'll use one solid
color to color everything in, and then I'll select [an alpha lock]. This ensures that I color within the lines
I'll put the base color in for her skin, and then I'll put in some shadows highlights and the sorts.
Her earliest models were her pet rabbits named Benjamin Bouncer and Peter Piper.
During the summer, the Potter family would travel north to Scotland.
There, Beatrix and her brother would explore the countryside, and it's here
that she learned to observe and illustrate plants and insects that she would come across.
When Beatrix grew older, she was invited to the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew
to study fungi. There, she would draw many botanical drawings and study their growth.
Charles McIntosh, a Scottish naturalist, encouraged her to make her illustrations more technically
accurate, allowing her to become a very skilled scientific illustrator. And then I'll color in
her hair and clothes, making sure to include some shading in there. In 1896, she developed a theory as
to how fungi reproduced, and wrote a paper called On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae.
While it was initially rejected by William Thiselton-Dyer, director of the Royal Botanical
Gardens, she continued her research and eventually had her paper presented to the Linnean Society of
London. George Massee, a fungi expert who worked at the Kew Gardens, was the one who presented it,
since women were not allowed to present research papers at the time.
Before she was a published author, she illustrated for tales such as
Alice in Wonderland and Cinderella. Some of her other earliest published works were
illustrations for greeting cards designs published by Hildesheimer & Faulkner.
Peter Rabbit was one of her earliest stories. It was initially rejected by multiple publishing
companies, so she decides to self-publish and sold her work to family and friends. Because of its
instant success, the publishing company Frederick Warne & Co. reconsidered their decision to
publish her story, so long as she illustrated it in color. Peter Rabbit became an instant best seller,
and afterwards she published The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin and The Tailor of Gloucester.
Beatrix was set on licensing her creations, and after creating the first Peter Rabbit
doll herself, she immediately registered it at the patent office.
This made Peter Rabbit the oldest licensed character in literature.
She worked very closely with merchandising for her stories to make sure they were faithful
to the story, and were of high quality. Of this merchandise, she made tea sets, toys, slippers,
and a board game. The money she made from her books were put into buying farmland. Included in this was
Hilltop Farm, which makes an appearance in many of her stories. In total she bought 15 farms and did
much of the farm work herself. She bred Herdwick sheep in her farms on the Lake District and won
many prizes for them. Because of this, she became the first female president of the Herdwick Sheep
Breeders Association in 1943. Super cool! While in the Lake District, she married William Heelis,
a man who helped her with her property investments, and they lived together in Castle Cottage in Lake
District until she passed away in 1943. Just as she wished, Hilltop Farm has been kept the same
ever since she passed, and gets thousands of visitors every year. More than two million Potter
books are sold across the world every year, which is four books per minute. Her timeless stories
have been passed on for generations, and will continue to be passed on for generations to come.
And then I'll start doing the background. I'm doing this on a new layer underneath my
original coloring layer.
I'm emulating her style in this background.
And once I'm done, I'll slightly add a gaussian blur on top, just to
bring the focus back to Beatrix.
And there's the final piece! If you enjoyed this video, give it a like! Please share it with a
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