CallMePo - Modern Elsa

A while back when CallMePo had opened up his commissions I immediately jumped in and requested for a commission of Elsa of “Frozen” in modern clothes.  I got this idea from a picture that I had seen while I was looking up reference images of Elsa’s dress for previous coloring projects.  During that time I came across a compilation picture that showed a set of more modern clothes but done with Elsa’s color coordination: ice blue, dark blue and so on. I immediately liked the idea so I held onto the image and showed it to Po and he went to work on it, after he had finished others who had gotten in line before me. 

The picture I’m talking about is this: 

As for the original lineart, here it is:  Modernized Elsa by CallMePo

After it was done, I had the task in front of me of not only coloring her but giving it a background.  The first challenge was the “over shirt” I guess you could call it.  The challenge was that it had a gradation to it, starting with a light blue at the top and going down to a dark blue at the bottom.  This included the sleeves at the top and going down to the cuffs.  And given that Elsa’s arms were in different positions this presented a very tricky challenge indeed.  So I went about coloring the shirt and giving it shading as if it were one color.  Then using the gradation paint tool I created one block of the color and then did some copying, pasting, manipulating and so on.

It is a shame that I don’t have the computing power or the software needed to make a capture video of the process that I took in making this.   Otherwise, I’d show all of you on how the process was done.
As for the background, initially my idea for that was a pretty ambitious one for the level of skill.  The idea I had beforehand was that I would try to paint a mall scene.  With Elsa in these modern clothes, I pictured her being a very fashionable woman and heading to a more expensive area of the mall, like say a Louis Vinton store or some close approximation of that.  But given the level of skill I have on hand it seemed a little too far beyond what I could do at the time.  And so I fell back on doing a simple wall background of her room.  Thanks to a wallpaper pattern that I found I was able to match, as close as I could, the wallpaper pattern of her room.

The setup now is that Elsa had just tried on her new outfit and was posing for Anna before she would head on out to “paint the town”.

Before posting it, I had to show this to my friend Clock-heart to show them how well I did with the gradation of the shirt.  And they were quite amazed at what I had done and as an artist I can’t help but feel great pride at what I was able to accomplish.

My thanks to CallMePo for drawing this and thanks to my friend Clock-heart for saying how well I did with it.

© Elsa - Frozen - Disney