My project for course: Kawaii-Style Story Illustration

At first, I rewatched a Disney movie to pick my scenes. I love Sleeping Beauty but I didn't remember the story by heart. And also I wanted to avoid kiss scene cause I thought it would be hard to draw in this style. (Yeah, the fight with the dragon wasn't easier.) So I selected 1) curse scene (I wanted to show Maleficent but she and Aurora are almost never in the same scene), 2) dancing in a forest, 3) pricking a finger, 4) sleep (can't avoid that), 5) fight with a dragon, 6) final dance (and dress magic!).

Then, I started to work on the characters. Maleficent and Prince were super easy, I liked them from the first draft. With Aurora it was a bit harder. First, she wears several dresses through out the movie, so I kinda did both in the sketch. (And I still like the first better.) But since I included the dance, I decided to use the ball gown everywhere to avoid confusion.

Working on the sketch I went though several iterations and tweaked things a lot. For example, in the original sketch I had way more thorns, but it was hard to see dragon behind them. I also decided to include the third fairy into scene with needle to show all three of them. In a process, I changed proportions of Aurora a bit, cause all three main characters had over heads.

In the beginning colors were also a challenge. I already had blue dress for Aurora, three fairies and Maleficent which should have been purple. And since they all are cats, I had to figure out fur color as well. So I was worried that I won't manage to tie all colors together. So I decided just to color everything as I thought it should be and adjust it later. Well, I didn't like the first version at all. But I realised I can utilise features of software, so I increased a luminosity and saturation for initial image. It instantly got better, but colors still weren't perfect yet. So, I added a new layer, put a blending mode on color and tried a bunch of options. Blues, greens, and yellows didn't do it for me but orange and pink I kinda liked. I really couldn't decide which one was better, so I kept both layers :D After that, everything was smooth and easy. I used Maleficent's color for shadows and Aurora's skin color for light. I used white to add some highlights and *magic*.

It took me two months from start to finish but I am extremely pleased with my final result! I worked on my lines, and I think they improved a lot. I had to re-do light and shadows, cause first I did them in my style and it didn't work. But in the end I've got the cutest poster I've ever done.