Very Merry Unbirthday Part 1

I haven’t done a large scale painting for quite some time and I’ve been itching to do one. I toyed around with the idea of doing one based on a drawing I did based on Plan 9 From Outer Space, but I abandoned that plan. I’ve noticed than any artwork I do based on Disney properties gets a lot more attention than anything else I do, so I decided to do something from Alice in Wonderland.

I watched the movie again and grabbed a bunch of screen caps as I went to decide what scene I wanted to paint. I decided on the Tea Party scene because there was a lot of great color and I liked the look of the characters. I liked the part where the Hatter and the Hare are hitting the high note in their song and the glasses are clanging together and tea is flying everywhere. One of the screen caps I grabbed was a shot looking down the table through all the weird looking tea pots at the main characters, I thought with a few changes this would make a good painting.

 

For my first rough sketch I changed a few things around. I moved up a lot closer to the characters so they would be more prominent in the final piece. I also changed the chairs the two of them were sitting in to ones that Alice was sitting in earlier. I just thought they were more interesting looking chairs. I also added a couple of lanterns and more defined shrubbery to the background.

I then went and did a much more detailed sketch of the scene. I added the stack of tea cups beside the Mad Hatter and moved the teapot with the mouse in it to the foreground.

The next step is pretty simple. I scan the line work and then use photoshop to block out all the flat colors.

Once the flats are laid you can go in and start to shade the piece. I added some glow to the lanterns, I like how it looks here but I’m not sure if I will be able to reproduce the effect with a paintbrush. One of these days I should look into getting an airbrush. I like how the sky turned out.

The next step is to re-sketch out the line art onto a canvas.  The canvas I picked up is 16 x 20. So I resized the artwork to 1600 x 2000 pixels in photoshop and got out my ruler and made a connect the dots version of the image on the canvas. I’m sure there are easier ways to do this, I’ve heard some people project the image onto the canvas and trace it. Maybe someday I’ll figure out how to do the same.

This is the end of part one. Once I get some more work done on the painting I’ll put up another post.