Snow Queen Work in Progress (Patreon)

After my Lolita dress drawing went so well, I thought I'd try something Rococo.
But that wasn't hard enough I guess?

I decided that I wanted to do a full illustration of something from my brain. So that meant background, furniture, and nothing copied from a photo. I have plenty of images in my brain, but actually making them is usually way too daunting. That lolita painting infused me with hubris and I've had a rococo Snow Queen in my brain forever so I decided to try it out. 

I started with actual thumbnails, which I almost never do, but you REALLY need to if you're just drawing from your imagination.

How do you draw objects in space? How do they interact with each other? What even is reality? Drawing something you can already see is hard enough. I don't know why I would do this to myself.

Ok, I do know why. Because that's how you actually get good at this stuff. I guess I was feeling up to a challenge.

I know enough about perspective to look at my thumbnails and say "Ah, this needs two point perspective.... how the hell do I do that?"
I watched some videos to remind me how that works and how one would use it to draw furniture.

I was still using reference images, but nothing I was exclusively drawing from. So I used this for furniture and leg positioning

And this for upper body pose

Thus ending with this sketch:

I couldn't let the vanity stay this bland so I went to work filling it up with various details inspired by a google image search.

I was starting to get the hang of boxes (kinda) so again, I made things even harder for myself with a mirror! And not just any mirror, oh no. A heart shaped one!

There were multiple times when this vanity seemed straight up impossible. But I kept at it, erasing and drawing and erasing and drawing until it finally looked something like what I wanted it to. I'm pretty sure 80% of skill acquisition is simply NOT just saying "Fuck it."

Then I had to do the dress. This was when I learned that drawing a frilly dress standing up is VERY different from a frilly dress sitting. I also learned that it's hard to find images of women in panniers sitting down. But I found a couple! Mostly by searching images from Harlots and a couple paintings of Marie Antoinette. It gave me a sense of how the fabric would drape and such.

Here is where I *did* say "Fuck it." because my original vision called for a much more frilly dress, which was white on white on white. Dear reader, I did not possess that strength.

Painting anything white is extremely difficult, especially with watercolors. Super duper especially, if it's multiple shades of white. And I feared any more detail on this dress would drive me mad. Even the paintings of Marie Antoinette didn't make her dress very detailed.

I also had so many sketch lines by then I was having a hard time making out which lines were the ones I wanted to keep. So I did some of the initial inking, erased all the pencil, and did a first paint layer.

Then I started penciling in a background. I've always avoided backgrounds but I'm not sure why. I guess creating depth always seemed too challenging. Also many backgrounds are architectural, which is something I still don't feel great at.

This was a forest though, so I think my trepidation was mostly about depth. When I inked everything I had the uncharacteristic forethought to ink some of the horizon line so I could keep it. Then I just drew in some lines with a ruler to keep me from overthinking things. Then I turned those lines in to tree shapes, big ones up front, smaller in the back. It seems obvious now, but I really had to think about it for a while.

I used a paint pen to cover up the inking mistake I made where her sleeve overlapped with the vanity. I inked in the trees, all brown for the ones in front, brown and black for the midrange ones, and only black for the farthest ones. It didn't seem like it should be that simple but, hey, something in this illustration had to be, right?

It's definitely not finished but it's in pretty good shape!

I'm not sure exactly where I want to go from here. More detail, obviously, more light and shadow. But I'm a little torn on which direction I want those details to go. 

I made the dress colors light so that I might try to maintain the snow queen idea. Maybe even try to figure out if I can work the dress into giving the  impression of being white. But my partner asked if the lady is a ghost and I really liked that idea, too. On the third hand the teal from the lolita painting looks so damn good, I kinda want to bring that into this dress, too.

I'll have to figure out what's reflecting in that mirror too, but I don't have the strength to think about that right now.