Yup, another artist is doing that six fan arts thing! Did you put in a request? Maybe
I drew it! Hello, and welcome back to Jenna Gets Creative!
As I just mentioned, today I am starting my six fan arts. As you can see, I've already
chosen and sketched all six thanks to suggestions I got across my social media platforms, but
in today's video we're only going to finish two of them. I intended for this to be a two-part
mini-series, but now it's looking like three parts. I divided a 9x12 inch sheet of mix
media paper into six rectangles with gaps, similar to the original template, so these
are really small, yet the first one took me over two hours. Thank you so much to everyone
who made suggestions, and I'm very sorry to the person I may have unintentionally insulted
when my phone's autocorrect made me leave a rather awkward reply. I meant to tell someone
their suggestion was good, but evidently I missed the g, and my phone turned O-O-D into
"old." I didn't mean to say your suggestion was old. What does that even mean?!
The original template and idea for the #SixFanarts challenge comes from the Instagram account
of artist Melissa Capriglione, very sorry if I've mispronounced that. Her social media
handle is up on screen now, and I'll also mention it in the description and tag her
when I share this stuff on my own Instagram. [[ Follow me on Instagram too, by the way!
@jennagetscreativeyt. Note the "yt" at the end; Another woman named Jenna already had
jennagetscreative when I decided I needed an Instagram. I remember looking through her
photos, and I see now her account's private, so now I'm wondering if she was getting contacted
by people trying to collaborate with me. Oops! Sorry other Jenna!
Anyway, the first two fan arts I'll be finishing today are Tiana from Disney's The Princess
and the Frog, and Unico from The Fantastic Adventures of Unico.
Tiana was one of several characters my best friend suggested as soon as I posted the blank
six fan arts template on Instagram, so I figured it was only fitting to do her in the top left
as my first piece. I admit I didn't pay too much attention to The Princess and the Frog
when it first came out in 2009. I was in my early 20s, living with a young man I thought
I was going to marry and settle with on the opposite side of the country from where I
am now, studying History and Psychology for the career I thought I was going to have teaching
high school students. An animated movie based on the children's bedtime story The Frog Prince
wasn't exactly high on my list. Don't feel bad on my behalf that I didn't end up pursuing
those things, though. I ended up making different choices, and if I hadn't, I wouldn't have
met my best friend or my husband, and I wouldn't have my daughter.
But let's get back on topic. I decided to go with this typical promotional image pose
of human Tiana and frog Naveen at the Mardi Gras party, before the kiss that turns Tiana
into a frog and starts the whole adventure. I feel like most of the time when people draw
Tiana, if they're drawing her in a dress, they pick the green number from the very end;
her Disney Princess look. I prefer the elegant blue number she changes into at the party,
presumably borrowing something from Lottie's wardrobe, because it's certainly not what
she showed up in. I want to take a minute and venture into a
potentially heated topic and talk about Tiana's hair. It's unclear exactly how curly her hair
is meant to be because of the simplified style of the artwork in this film, but I appreciate
the fact that Disney hasn't completely smoothed her hair out in every style she wears it in
like they do with most the European princesses, because it certainly wouldn't be smooth. She's
a black girl in New Orleans in the mid-1920s, she's not a woman of wealth, and she turns
down opportunities to have a night on the town with friends in favour of working an
extra shift to save for her restaurant. It's pretty safe to assume she wasn't going to
a fancy salon and paying for expensive treatments to straighten her hair, and given that women
in the 1960s were using clothing irons to straighten their hair, it's also a safe bet
that Tiana didn't have any sort of home straightening iron in her little apartment in the 1920s.
So she was definitely wearing her hair natural for day to day purposes, and probably wouldn't
have indulged in any sort of semi-permanent straightening techniques the rare time she
dresses up. Add on top of that the fact that she changed from her serving look into this
blue gown princess look in Lottie's bedroom, having come straight from her kitchen and
served the party for a while, her hair was styled quickly and probably with blonde girl
Lottie's tools and products. I appreciate the curly strays and the implied texture in
the shape of her bun. I was careful in my version of this look not to make the lines
and edges of her hair look too perfect as to imply straight hair.
I did my Tiana artwork using Faber-Castell Goldfaber pencils. I've reviewed these pencils
before, but it's been a while since I've worked on a piece exclusively in these pencils, so
let's talk about them again. They're a wax based core, and being the Goldfaber label,
they're student quality supplies. Like most Faber-Castell products, if you swatch these
pencils next to the professional quality Polychromos pencils bearing the same colour numbers, you'll
see that the same pigments have been used. What's different is the other ingredients
that go into the pencil core. Polychromos are oil based cores, there's lots of pigment
used, and only as much binder as required to make the strong, functional leads they
need. Goldfabers, being student quality pencils, have more binder and less pigment. This means
you have to work harder to get opaque coverage, and you're not going to be able to layer as
much without help from something like OMS. They have a much harder core than other popular
wax based pencils, like Prismacolor, so it's easy to accidentally leave harsh lines or
scratch unintended texture into previous layers when layering and blending. I think these
pencils are a great starting point for artists who are learning to work in coloured pencil
or crafters who don't feel the need to spend top dollar for professional pencils, but these
pencils do have limitations. You may notice me patting down areas I was finished burnishing,
and that's to remove loose pigment and binder that doesn't stick, but also doesn't easily
blow away. You may also notice me frequently erasing stray smudged colour off of surrounding
white areas. I had no choice but to do preliminary ink
line work on Unico when I moved on to the second rectangle, because there was so much
colour debris over there that needed to be erased. I definitely encountered this with
the fire wolf I drew as part of a collab that never happened, which turned into the footage
I used when I originally reviewed these pencils. (Sorry by the way for the background noise.
The neighbour's kid is riding an ATV up and down their driveway. It's rather annoying.)
I ended up cutting that wolf out and gluing it onto different paper because of the massive
halo of smudged colour all around him. It's possible that the right paper would mitigate
this. I'm using Canson XL Mix Media paper here, and while it's a decent surface for
most supplies, it's not the best for anything. These pencils are probably more lightfast
than other student pencils, such as Prismacolor's Scholars, which I assume because they appear
to use the same pigments as Polychromos, which are almost all very lightfast. That said,
the cores are completely different, and all the other ingredients that go into a pencil's
core can affect things like lightfastness, so I wouldn't blindly trust these to last
forever. Faber-Castell doesn't release lightfastness information on their Goldfaber products, which
likely means they don't bother to test the line.
I finished this piece off with line work using a Graph'it brush liner, and some white details
using a Sakura gelly roll white gel pen. Brush pens aren't my favourite for final line work,
since I find it difficult to get consistent lines, but fineliner nibs tend to clog and
scratch when used over wax, so I opted to gently lay the ink on top with a brush liner.
This dried quickly in place and didn't smudge at all, which I was worried about. Overall
I'm happy with this piece, but I'm frustrated that I couldn't completely flatten the paper's
tooth and fill in all the little white gaps, and I'm annoyed that roughly 10 square inches
took over 2 hours to complete. The second fan art I decided to do is, as
already mentioned, Unico from The Fantastic Adventures of Unico. I'll admit, I wasn't
at all familiar with this character or series before receiving this suggestion. The Fantastic
Adventures of Unico, a follow up series called Unico in the Island of Magic, and various
other guest appearances of this character in other animated properties are all Japanese
created anime shows. The character was first created in manga form in the 1970s, and apparently
English dubs of the original animes were aired in the USA on Disney Channel in the early
and mid 1980s. I missed that boat, though, both because that channel didn't air where
I was growing up in Canada at that time, and because early to mid 80s is a little too early
for my cartoon watching years. DVDs of Unico series and feature length films were eventually
English dubbed and sold in North America in 2012, but that's the year 24 year old yours
truly was moving across the country to start a second bachelor degree program in an entirely
new province. I moved away from my anime loving friends from high school, hadn't yet made
anime loving friends over here in Newfoundland, and didn't have the time or advertising sources
to even know this existed. So yeah, first I've heard of this adorable character.
Unico is a baby unicorn character, mostly white with pink mane, though he is traditionally
shaded in light blue. I based this pose on a particular image I saw of him, since I'm
not overly familiar, but I did put my own flair on it. I know I've drawn his features
all a little different than the anime style, and I think that's kind of the point of this
challenge. Fan art in your own style. So here's what a round little pink-maned white unicorn
from an anime looks like in my style. And please forgive any details that look unfinished
with the markers. Mix Media paper is much thirstier than marker paper. The ink soaks
right in, looks darker, and doesn't blend as much. It works for something like this
where I want harsh edges to my shading, but it also means it was hard to control where
the edges of colour ended up, and how smooth blocks of colour ended up being.
I haven't decided yet what mediums I'm going to use for the remaining four characters,
so feel free to make suggestions in the comments down below. The other four characters are
Yoda, Wandering Oaken, Heihei, and Captain Amelia. I'm very tempted to pull out the conté
crayons for one of these. Maybe Yoda? If you're looking for something else to watch,
I've got some suggestions for you on the left side of the screen, and if you want to see
more of that teeny weeny art challenge a few of us did recently, then come back on Saturday
for a bonus video encore. I upload art content twice a week at minimum, every Tuesday and
Thursday, and if you like living life creatively, whatever that means to you, I'd love to have
you along for the ride. Bye guys!