Today, I'm taking on the Kids Coloring Book Challenge. ADC Art Attack has been doing these
videos for at least a year now and his videos have been amazing,
you can check out his channel here.
I've seen several other amazing artists
like Chloe Rose and Temi Danso jump on this trend recently, too,
so it's my turn.
And if we're doing a kid's coloring book,
what better place to start than with Disney! In choosing who to color,
i was on the fence between something new like the Mandalorian with the challenge
of the metallic surfaces or the classic Disney and the princesses.
So I've actually decided to choose a Disney princess today.
And I went to the Disney website to see what range of coloring pages they had
available to print. Choosing a printable coloring page instead of a coloring book
gives me more flexibility in using the paper I want to use instead of being
limited to the paper that the publisher has chosen.
However, it does bring a lot of limitations in what is available.
If you're wanting to find some good coloring pages online,
I have a huge range on my own website and an article I've put together
with a massive list of websites where you can find free coloring pages direct
from the artist and the publishers without breaking copyright. In the case of Disney,
there are a lot of stolen coloring pages online, so the only way to be sure
that my source was legit was to go direct to Disney themselves.
Ariel has always been a favorite, but I recently did a drawing of Ariel,
so I don't really want to do her again as a coloring page.
I'd probably like to do someone different.
Princess Tiana might be fun?
I would actually love to do Beauty and the Beast, although I'm not really
keen on all this big border thing that they've got going on.
I think I'd rather an actual scene.
Same with Snow White, I'd actually really like to color this one,
but I really don't like the idea of this
fancy border that they've added. You can even color it on the Internet!
So I've chosen Tiana and I've printed her on some Neenah Bristol Vellum cardstock.
You can see my other paper recommendations on the full video I did
last week and why I think this is a great choice for markers and pencils.
I've printed my page very lightly because the original lines are quite thick and I
really want to replicate the nice Disney look of the fine colored lines.
This is something you can do in Photoshop or with some printers,
or you can add a layer of white ink before you start coloring.
I'm not using my Color Catalog today.
Instead, I'm using reference photos of Tiana
because I want to replicate the original Disney look as much as possible.
So I'm choosing my colors based on what
seems to be the closest to the colors in my reference images,
even though the lighting is different in each of these images.
So I've found a selection of browns,
a selection of blues, and I've got a spare piece of paper
to test them out first so I can choose which colors are the best match.
I'll do the same for my markers and I won't
need as many different colors of the markers because these will be used
more as a base layer, whereas my pencils will be doing the more
specific shading and highlights. With my colors ready,
it's time to start on my base layer of marker.
I've decided to start on her skin.
So first I'm using my lighter marker
color and just doing a simple coat over the base layer of her skin.
This is the same process I taught you
in my previous video on how to draw skin with alcohol markers.
I'm quite happy with how this is turning
out so far, even before we add the pencils.
Which, come to think of it,
I probably should have swatched on the markers because this can completely
change how the color looks. So I'm quickly doing some extra swatching
and I'm glad I did, because some of these browns that I thought would be perfect
actually really don't work with these markers underneath.
As I'm filling in her facial details and adding some more shading,
I feel like this isn't quite looking right anymore...
Wait... are her eyes in the right spot?
Some of these lighter colors are making her skin pasty.
I don't know about this...
I feel like the angle....
You know what,
I reckon the angle of the eyes is wrong, because I'm sitting back here.
When I should be looking at it from here.
Because her eyes look totally wrong,
What should I do Shane?
This is bad.
It can't be that bad.
Yeah, you should probably start over.
I don't want to start over.
I've already been doing this for about an hour.
Yeah, but
better to start over now than to regret it in a few more hours.
So this is something I almost never do, but today I just don't feel happy
with this and it's better to start over now than to continue frustrated from here.
So I've got some Aussie chocolates,
I've taken a short break and I'm ready to start again.
This time I'll outline all
the facial details first so I can see
the lines underneath and get the proportions right.
This actually looks like her now!
And I'll be careful not to go overboard on the skin tones, it actually looked OK
until I started fiddling and adding too many layers,
so less is more.
Let's just quickly compare; he's my first
attempt, and I'm really glad I started over on this one, the first attempt was
good practice and the final page looks much better.
Moving on, let's get her hair done,
and then for these gloves, I'm not sure if they are supposed to be
white or blue, but all the pictures look blue,
so we're going to go with that.
If you are new to this channel, the idea of a professional artist doing
a children's coloring book might seem a bit unusual, but if you're a regular
viewer, this isn't really a whole lot different than what we usually do here.
You see, I create my own coloring books for adults, and this channel is all about
teaching you how to use pencils, markers and other mediums to create amazing art.
So this challenge is really just an excuse
to pull out a Disney coloring book instead of one of my own.
But if this is something you'd like to see more of it, let me know in the comments.
Tell me what I should color next or what challenge you'd like to see me take on.
And don't forget to press the subscribe
button for more coloring tips and ways to get creative.
So as I'm doing the base layer of the dress with the markers,
they are a little bit blotchy at first while they're wet.
But as I do more layers of the same color,
while it's getting a little bit darker, it is smoothing out that blotchyness.
And as they dry, it is looking just great.
This paper is handling the extra moisture surprisingly well.
Some papers might buckle if you want to know more about paper,
I did just publish an in-depth guide to my favorite papers on my channel last week.
As I'm adding more, the paper is starting
to warp slightly, so I need to stop and let this dry.
We can smooth out the rest of the texture with our pencils.
For the shading of the dress,
I'm adding shadows where the folds and where it feels natural.
I'm also using this color to add a slight outline which is typical of Disney's style
and one of the main reasons I wanted to hide the black lines.
I do want this dress to look smooth,
so I'm using some lighter pencils and my short white pencil to smooth out
and burnish my pencil shading along her dress.
This is lightening some of the areas a bit
too much, so I'm adjusting and adding some more shadows as well.
Between her sash, the gloves and the dress,
I'm adding more shadows bit by bit as they become obvious to me,
usually as I start adding some shadows, other areas look flat.
And so it becomes more obvious where else shadows should be added.
So just start in the easy areas and build up as you go.
She's almost done at this point,
but let's just take a moment to add some sparkles. Because,
sparkles are fun, and I can't help myself.
As I'm finishing up Tiana's dress, it's confession time.
I've never actually seen The Princess and The Frog.
It's one of the few Disney movies still on my list to see
and I don't know how I've missed it for so long.
I think I'll have to watch this weekend.
But I bring this up because I've noticed that some of these pictures of Tiana
showed her gloves or dress sparkling while others don't.
So I'm not really sure if it's her gloves,
sash or dress that is supposed to sparkle because every picture is different.
So I found this actual scene on Disney's YouTube channel.
This will also help me to get some context
for the background colors when we start coloring that shortly.
But it seems like her gloves are actually white, her dress is quite a bit lighter than
it looks in the other photos and it has some sparkles.
So I think we have to add some more sparkles.
But before we do, let's not forget little... What's the frog's name? Prince Naveen...
Looking a little green.
So we are adding sparkles all over her dress now with my favorite white pens, I've
got here my Sakura Decoresse, and I've got my Uni-ball Signo.
I've also pulled out my Gelly Roll
and if you've been watching this channel
and if you've watched my white gel pen review video, you'll know that I don't
generally like or recommend this pen for using on colored pencils.
I'm trying it today because I really want this fine point,
but like I've said in the past, it's not working well on pencils.
It's better on markers and it's actually great on markers.
But it's not really helping me out today,
so I'm sticking with the Decoresse
and the Uni-ball Signo to try and add as many sparkles as we can.
I've also tried doing a few little stars, but that's not really working out for me.
I really do need a finer point for those,
so we're just going to work with different
size dots to try and create that sparkling effect.
Now it's time for our background.
If it weren't for the lines that are
already drawn in this background, I would probably leave this picture here.
I really like Tiana has turned out and I'm a little scared,
that I might totally mess this up if I don't do a good job on the background here.
I want the background to be fairly dark and just like the scene in the movie,
because the dark background will help our main characters stand out.
So what I assume is actually a pink
and white wall is more of a purple color and we're going with that.
I also don't want the background to be as
perfect and crisp as our characters because that's typically what Disney does.
The characters are cartoon and their
backgrounds are often painted and a little more artistic.
So our lines don't have to be as perfect
and our textures shouldn't be smoothed out as much as our characters.
I worry that we might lose some of our
characters on this dark wall, especially with Tiana's dark hair
so I'm going to add a bit of a glow around Tiana and the Frog by using a lighter
marker and blending it out to the darker background.
It's not perfect because my markers are quite
different in values here, but I can tidy this up with pencils more lighter.
OK, this chest of drawers,
not really sure what I'm trying to do here, but it's not looking quite right.
I wanted it to look white, but in a dark room.
So I've gone with gray.
I'm going to just work on our base colors
for now and hope I can figure this out when I bring in my pencils later.
With markers done, it's back to our pencils.
I'm adding some more shading to all
the different background areas with my pencils.
Basically at this point, I'm just looking for anything that is
a little flat and asking myself, could I add another shadow here?
OK, back to this dreaded chest of drawers.
I think this is supposed to be like
a classic royal gold trim dressing table, but the simplified linework and the dark
lighting is going to make it hard to create something so detailed.
I've previously done a full video tutorial
on drawing gold, and I've got my swatches here that I created in that video.
So try to cover up my ugly marker work with one of these swatches and see if we
can create some gold trim without messing this up further.
I found a reference photo with a similar
shape of the part I'm coloring, but the colors are totally different.
So I'm just looking at how the light
bounces off the reflective gold surface here.
So I think being close to something like this can be really hard because you're
looking at each color and lines so closely instead of looking at the whole picture.
Because right now this is frustrating
and ugly from my perspective and not at all what I was hoping for.
And now I'm getting impatient and I've
just put a big black mark on and I don't really like it.
This might be one of those walk away and it will look better later things,
but right now I feel like I've just made an ugly mess of these drawers.
It's OK.
This is just the background.
Tiana is our focus here.
I will try and add a bit more shading on the side of these drawers to maybe draw
less attention to them and hide them in the dark background a little bit more.
We'll see how that goes.
And I think I'm finally done.
At first I found this page to be harder than I expected.
Admittedly, I haven't colored skin very
often at this point, so that's probably why I found it to be such a challenge.
But I think the perfectionist in me was struggling with trying to make Tiana look
as accurate to the original Disney version of this story as possible.
I was treating this like a realism
challenge instead of enjoying the process of coloring.
Once I got through the skin and hair,
though, I did start to relax and enjoy the process more.
I was able to use my intuition rather than
rely on my references for the curves in her dress.
And adding the sparkles is always fun.
The background didn't turn out as well as
I would have liked, but it does provide a good stage
for my main characters and they stand out well against the dark surroundings.
So overall, I am really happy with how
this turned out and I do think I'd like to try this challenge again.
So now that we're done, I am going to watch a movie.
(Shane: No, Wait, wait, wait, wait.)
(Shane: I've got your next challenge already picked out.)
Storm Troopers are white, Shane.
So I guess we're done?