Here we are again, at the end of another round of Pure Art Collab themes. If you’re new to my blog and to this concept, Pure Art Collab is a community collaboration event (open to all mediums) started by @amotherofdragoneggs and myself after the conclusion of our #princessartcollab last fall. We wanted to offer a casual collaboration for people who don’t have the time to be involved with daily or weekly prompts but still wanted some place they could turn when they need a challenge or a boost of inspiration.
Originally, this was all grouped together via a central hashtag (#purecollab), but with this most recent theme we launched our very own Instagram account as the next step. This way we could have information all in one place, and take and feature submissions on our feed to spotlight the awesome community we’re growing. This was easily our most successful round of themes so far, and I only hope we can keep this momentum going!
With every conclusion of these sets of themes, I like to do a little blog post that goes more in depth behind the piece I created and the thought process behind it. In the past, I’ve also listed all of the participating members of the collab, but because you guys absolutely rocked it this time, it would take me hours to get all of you in here! We had some amazing creators participate in our Disney-inspired villains theme where we created pieces inspired by Ursula, Maleficent, Hades, and Jafar. Not only did we receive submissions from a variety of mediums (nail art, resin, polymer clay, glass, among several others), but I think my favorite part throughout this theme was looking at our @pureartcollab feed and seeing the color coordination for the different villain sections.
Thank you for helping our first theme on the Instagram account go off better than we could have expected!
Theme 1: Ursula
Out of these 4 villains, I have to admit Ursula was the one who gave me the most trouble when it came to brainstorming what I wanted her to look like. The other 3 villains are at least humanoid, so I treated their appearance in terms of features and clothing (although I did do something different for Maleficent). With Ursula already being a character with animal characteristics, I was struggling to find a way to blend Ursula’s octopus bits with my dragon.
I knew I wanted to take a few key pieces from her: her white hair, her blue eyeshadow, and her shell necklace. However, did I want to treat this dragon like my merdragons and try to create a half octopus, half dragon figurine? I instead decided to “dress up” my dragon as Ursula, treating the octopus parts like a dress.
She has 6 tentacles like she does in the movie, but she, as a dragon, still has her 2 legs and a tail. Once I had that part figured out, the other details fell into place.
Theme 2: Maleficent
Maleficent ended up being the easiest of the villains for me to create since she has a dragon form. Instead of taking her humanoid characteristics and translating it, I created her dragon form (from the animated movie) in my style. Aside from the color palette, I took two characteristics from Maleficent’s dragon form: her curved horns and the gill-like “ears” on the side of her head.
Afterward, however, I decided she needed something a bit more, so I decided to attempt sculpting her sidekick, Diablo. Thankfully birds can be broken into simplified shapes so I was very happy with how he turned out. He’s perched on her leg ready to divulge their enemy’s secrets and take new orders.
Theme 3: Hades
Hades is probably one of my favorite villains because he has a good balance of bad guyness (that’s the scientific word 😉 ) and comedy. Similarly to Ursula, I treated this dragon as one that would be dressed up as Hades. He has the characteristic blue-gray coloring of Hades’s skin, the yellow eyes, and blue two-toned firey face scales representing Hades’s hair.
I created his robes from a dark blue-gray color and attempted the smoky billowy affect at the bottom of those robes similarly to Ursula’s tentacles. Besides the face scales, my favorite detail about this dragon is the skull pin on his shoulder.
Theme 4: Jafar
Jafar was another dragon I chose to dress up. I pulled just a few characteristics from his character outside of the color palette. I gave my version of Jafar the beard, cape, and staff. While he has some other defining articles of clothing, I try really hard not to cover the heads of my dragons because those are the most detailed areas that I really like to let shine. So, instead, I incorporated a rhinestone into one of the face scales as a homage.
I’m still getting practice with creating dragons that hold things, and the snake staff was no different. I’ve experimented with a few ways of doing them, particularly because I try to add something in the center to help create extra support and decrease the chance of the staff snapping.
I thoroughly enjoyed working with this palette of deep red, black, and gold, although I had to be careful with transferring red to my gold so that I wasn’t coloring it.
Overall, another great series for the books. I’m sure we’ll be revisiting more villains in the future, but for now we’re preparing for our next theme starting July 15! I hope you can join us :).