Fran Meneses

March challenge wrap-up! Little Prince - Illustration Club! (Patreon)

Published:

2019-03-30 17:02:08

Edited:

2019-04-01 14:20:44

Imported:

2022-05

Content

My beloved nerds: I'm writing you from my kitchen, it's a sunny WARM day in New York, yaaay!

I wanted to write this post yesterday, but I was feeling under the weather (aka. mega sick) maybe due to the weather changing so much lately OR the fact that now I have to commute to work and I think being surrounded by people makes you more likely to get sick (in comparison to work from home where you don't have that much contact with the outside world!).

ANYWAY, HELLO! Here we are again, wrapping up another wonderful month in our Illustration Club! This month's challenge was The Little Prince, and oh boy I had high expectations about this one. My goal for this challenge was to do a full-color illustration, I really wanted to add a new piece for my portfolio, but I think I was asking too much for such a busy, pre-Mocca month.

I'm not gonna lie guys, I had such a nice time drawing The Little Prince. I was constantly asking myself: "okay, how would I, FRAN, draw this character?". The Little Prince is such a famous character; we all know how he looks like, everybody has drawn him a million times, so I wanted to "rethink" a new way of designing this character. Once I drew him a couple of times the hair was the first thing that caught my attention:

I made his hair longer! And I liked it! Also: I had huge issues on how to draw the Rose; "how can I draw Rose with a face?" I didn't want to pull an Alice and Wonderland

so I kept thinking, is there any other way? And I came up with this:

Basically Rose is this child-looking-entity inside a rose hahaha, weird but interesting! I wanted both the Prince and Rose to be as androgynous as possible, like, you can never tell if is a girl dressed as a prince, or a prince with long hair!

Then I was like "Okay, I'm done with the sketches, let's move on to the full-color illustration!" And I started working on a few digital sketches on my ipad:

That same day I found this gorgeous illustration painted with pastels and I felt so drawn to the colour palette (is very similar to the colors I use today), so I decided to take a few:

And this is what I came up with

I feel so weird about the result guys. I'm trying not to be judge-y (because when you're experimenting and trying stuff out, it's nice not to be that horrible person saying "oh, is this the BEST you can do? are you REALLY going to paint like this? is this what you REALLY wanted to do?" hahaha) but I noticed I still have such a long way to go. I haven't painted a full-color illustration in SO LONG. All my instagram illustrations are 4-5 colours tops, but none of them are mega complicated in terms of shadowing and colorful backgrounds and stuff.

So this challenge was awesome cause it let me know I have to keep working on full colour illustrations. What I did was not bad, but I don't see myself in those two illustrations, you know what I mean? I LOVED the sketches, that's the thing, I loved everything on my sketchbook, but when I transferred that into the ipad to full-color, that's when something didn't quite work. I hope I'm making sense! I need to develop my own language/style when it comes down to painting!

Here, as always, are your GORGEOUS submissions for this month's challenge! Credits (Discord username) are bellow each piece, thank you SO MUCH once again for inspiring me to do better my loves.

PLEASE leave your suggestions down below for next month's challenge, I'd love to know if there's anything you'd like to practice/improve :)