Welcome to another edition of Pure Art Collab! We just finished up our 2 year celebration. I can’t believe this community collab has already been happening for 2 years! Time sure does fly.
Since we still had more Disney princesses to cover, we revisited our very first theme myself and a small group of creators participated in, #princessartcollab.
From there, we expanded to a bimonthly set of weekly themes that all correlated. We’ve grown a wonderful community of creators from all walks of life, and I’m excited to see what the future holds!
This time, we focused on Moana, Tiana, and Mulan, and then the final week was a choose-your-own option.
Since I’m still taking a step back from polymer clay, I decided to experiment with some watercolor for these themes. I love that the Pure Art Collab allows for an easy way to experiment with other processes and ideas!
Theme 1: Moana
For each theme, I decided I wanted to keep the painting fairly simple (only because I’m not great at drawing and painting detail). For Moana, I decided I wanted the focal point to be the Heart of Te Fiti. I went back and forth between the stone and a shell, but I don’t think I could have painted the dimension of a shell very well, so I stuck witht he more simple shape.
The stone is essentially the same watercolor pigment, and then I played with layers and using less and more water to create different shades. Once everything was dry, I went in with a small brush, and an extremely pigmented one at that, and drew in the details.
I think watercolor collages of color are so gorgeous. I still have a lot to learn, but my backgrounds for all 4 pieces were me experimenting with just blending colors together for the background. For Moana, I chose colors from her outfit (the tan and red) and then some blue and teal colors for the ocean.
The blend here is pretty harsh, but I still think the colors are pretty together!
Theme 2: Tiana
Tiana’s painting is the only one I had a completely different idea for. I was inspired to paint her as her frog self (because painting a human would be asking too much of my limited skills :P) looking up at the fireflies and Evangeline.
Because I love, love the green tones of her dress, I also decided to start with a green gradient around her and work up to a night sky, transitioning into blue, into purple, and then into black.
Originally, I had painted the swirl of fireflies in and was going to paint the sky around it. You can see where I didn’t get to fill in that area as much as I would have liked. In hindsight, I wish I would have just painted the whole sky first and then painted the fireflies with acrylic paint on top.
I really love how the green gradient area turned out, all the way until where the fireflies start. Not only did I have a hard time painting around them, but doing the gradients around them was really hard for me too. Lesson learned for next time, though! 
And even though she doesn’t wear a crown as a frog, I thought it would be pretty to add some metallic acrylic paint for a pop of gold.
Theme 3: Mulan
For Mulan, a symbol I thought would be fairly easy to paint was the flower. Someone help me, because I thought it was a cherry blossom, but when I was doing research, people were also calling it a magnolia bloom, which I could totally see. So which is it!?
I started with the blossom, attempting to play with some subtle shading on the petals, and then detailing with more pigment once the first layer was dry.
The colors for the background here are inspired by her outfit as well—deep red, blue, a darker green, and a more lime green. I felt like the blending was a little more free in this painting, but still very harsh.
I do think it makes for a pretty contrast against the flower!
Theme 4: Choose Your Own
Even though I’ve chosen Rapunzel before, she’s probably my favorite princess, and I thought the lantern would look so pretty in watercolor!
That was, of course, what I painted for her painting. I should have made it bigger, but I still love how it turned out! The first layer of the lantern is a gradient from yellow to orange. Once that was dry, I used a very pigmented brush to paint the sun.
One of the things I get drawn to with Tangled is the purple and pink color palette. I’m not really sure why, but they just look so lovely together, especially with the golden yellow tones, so that was my choice of color for the background.
This was definitely the painting I did the least planning for the background. My husband always tells me that I plan too much; even when I try to appear organic, it still looks planned. While I still think that’s the case here, I really let myself go during the painting process and tried to not let myself think too much about what color I was going to use next or what that color block was going to look like.
And that’s the line up from this theme’s Pure Art Collab. Do you have a favorite painting? Who is your favorite Disney princess?