Painting Sleeping Beauty - by Anoosha Syed
At the beginning of the year, I was invited by Gallery Nucleus to create an illustration for an upcoming group show. They are hosting an exhibition featuring the work of legendary Disney concept artist Eyvind Earle, and to celebrate the 74th anniversary of Sleeping Beauty, the gallery also planned a tribute show of artwork inspired by both the movie and the artist.
I had a lot on my plate this spring, but I couldn’t say no to the opportunity. Earle’s signature style is a huge inspiration to me, especially when working on my upcoming picture book The Salt Princess. I have been leaning heavily on traditional folk painting techniques this past year, and I felt that I could combine these two passions into a really fun piece.
I started by digitally planning my sketch on my iPad on Procreate. The invited artists were given a lot of creative freedom in the concept and were told that the artwork could be either inspired by the Sleeping Beauty film in general, specifically Earle’s art style or be similar to the gallery’s Disney Travel Poster series that I’ve previously been a part of.
I knew that I wanted to stick closely to the folk painting style, so I chose to focus on Aurora and an Earle-styled background.
Some Eyvind Earle painting study requirements include:
Boxy trees and shrubbery
Flat and wacky perspective
Lack of depth - essentially giving the effect of a tapestry
An emphasis on vertical shapes and lines
High contrast
To give my own Anoosha magic, I added a border and more decorative detailing in the background.
In terms of both color and composition, I was most inspired by this particular piece:
And here is my finished sketch! I sent it for approval to the Gallery and Disney and sat twiddling my thumbs until I got the OK to paint.
After the approval, I was stuck in the middle of a deadline and a move so I waited until two weeks before the final delivery date to start painting. Typical me.
I printed out my sketch and cut/taped the sections together to get my final 12x16 dimensions.
Using my lightbox, I lightly sketched out the main portions of my illustrations. No need to get too detailed since most of it will be painted over anyway.
Although I was basing my color palette on a specific Earle painting, I didn’t want to stick too closely to it since I still wanted this piece to be my own. I began with the sky so I could base all other surrounding colors around it.
Gradients are hard, and not something I’ve mastered yet.
I am using Holbein Designer Gouache here, my medium of choice. I went color-by-color, starting with my lighter shades and then layering with my darker colors after. I decided to stick to warm shades for my lighter elements, and cool for the dark. My beloved Prussian Blue played a big part in this painting.
After blocking in my flat colors, I started to go in with my details. Leaves, lineart, patterns and so on.
This is my favourite part of the painting process, and I was able to bring in my Indian Miniature Painting skills here too.
I left Aurora to the end, and remained faithful to her movie design, although I felt quite tempted to mix it up a bit.
I had considered making this into a mixed media piece and adding in some color pencil or Posca marker elements, but was pretty happy with the gouache and didn’t want to add more texture to this fine-detail heavy piece.
And voila! Painting complete! My scanner was unfortunately still packed up so I resorted to a few iPhone photos to document my final piece. I did some very minor corrections on Procreate to clean up some edges and fix color, but otherwise left it as is.
The exhibition will take place from June 1-16th, and this piece will be available for sale, as well as twenty others from incredible industry professionals including:
Lorena Alverez Gomez
Natalie Andrewson
Beverly Arce
Drake Brodhal
Natalie Dombois
Yvan Duque
Jennifer Ely
Vanessa Gillings
Marie-Alice Harel
Liana Hee
Sara Kipin
Ashly Lovett
Baptiste Lucas
Maria Mélart
Sibylline Meynet
Yoichi Nishikawa
Pernille Orum
Whitney Pollett
Bailie Rosenlund
Israel Sanchez
Anoosha Syed :)
Chris Thornley
Ian Truong
Crystal-Jade Vaughan
If you have any questions about my process, do let me know below!
THAT’S IT BYE!
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