For those of you who don’t know, I’m a graphic design major. My forte is designing on the computer, especially in Illustrator and Photoshop. However, this week, someone from HPU came to me and asked for a drawing for his sister’s birthday. She works at Disney and plays each of the characters featured, and he wanted them to be on one drawing to give to her over spring break. I’m not amazing or anything when it comes to drawing, but I’m not half bad either. He said he would pay me $100 (WHOA!) and I could put it in my portfolio of course. So this week was focused on this drawing, at least for a couple days.
I wanted the characters to interact, so from left to right, I have Winnie the Pooh offering Suzy and Perla his honey, while Handy Manny is in the background waving to the viewer. Suzy is honored by Pooh’s offer but Perla is shy so she leans closer to Snow White in the middle. Snow White, a princess (duh!), is flattered as Mr. Penguin waits on her. Jessie stands behind Chip and Dale, joining in on their excitement while she waves to the audience and the chipmunks link arms and spin around. Does the viewer realize all of that? Maybe, maybe not. But I wanted it to look like all of the characters were interacting with each other instead of just standing next to each other in a straight line, all facing forward. I decided to add “Walt Disney” across the top, with a drawing of the castle to bring the image together. My original thought was to do the castle from the Disney logo, but I thought this one matched the style of the rest of the drawing a lot better. Before adding color, I drew everything in pencil first, looking at an image of each character on my computer. I added color and worked hard to get all of the shading right, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. My favorite part is the yellow in Snow White’s dress, just because I really like how I did the shading. I also like the white layer underneath, which is shown on the left side as she holds up part of her dress. I was hesitant at first because I wasn’t sure how to show the shadows on white, but I think I made the right choice.
Overall, I’m pretty pleased with how it came out. It only took a few hours, which is nothing for an art student, and it’s another type of work to add to my portfolio. It’s also the first thing I’ve done and gotten paid for. The client set the price, not me, so I was really excited when he told me what he wanted to pay. Either way, I was happy to have something different to put into my portfolio.
Speaking of my portfolio, I also started creating my online portfolio this week. If you’re interested in checking it out, go to http://www.madeleineromano.com and you can see some of the work I’ve done! It isn’t finished but so far it looks pretty good, and most of my stuff is already posted so you can see. If you do look at it, let me know what you think! Thanks 🙂
College through a lens 