Disney Princess Pinup #2 - "Up Where They Walk" featuring Ariel

*So Blogger's acting stupid and completely altering the color, saturation and overall appearance of my painting. For the real version, please check out my site.

In the continuation of my pinup series featuring my favorite Disney princesses, I present to you my second painting featuring Ariel entitled “Up Where They Walk.” Visually it’s pretty straight forward, but I wanted to make sure that this piece also carried my previous theme of capturing the Disney Princess in question candidly. Thus I wanted to show Ariel in a pose and mood that really captures her sense of wonderment and longing for the world outside the sea.

As far as the painting went, this one was interesting as it’s been the only painting of mine in recent memory to have really given me a strong enough headache to have made me want to quit it. What had happened was that I committed one of the most serious of errors an artist can ever commit when starting to actually paint – indecision. Once you’re drawing and/or value designs are done, you need to know where you’re going with your color. Otherwise, you’ll be swaying back and forth making decisions that don’t mean anything since color is completely relative.

In my particular case I didn’t commit to any specific color palette, which killed me because I kept going back and forth from trying to paint an idealized scene to a more realistic underwater scene. I can’t tell you how many skin tones I kept  using trying to make her look as alluring as I wanted, and ultimately I decided to throw realism to the wind and go with the idealized depiction. After all, that’s what art is supposed to be, right? An idealization of the real world. Or at the very least that’s one thing art can do, and in my case I decided Ariel would look more beautiful with less blue in her skin and hair, which is what would normally be the case in such a blue environment.

Hope you enjoy it!