B is for Brittney Lee and Beaumont

It took me a bit of searching to decide on which artist to share with you today; but after going through many artists I love that have names that start with the letter B, Brittney Lee stood out to me the most.
I love this girl's work! She has a very enchanting illustration style that I've found appealing for a long time.  The first thing I'd ever seen from her was a portrait of the little Mermaid from Disney's movie- done completely with flat shapes and paper!  You can look at that piece if you click on this link.  I instantly fell in love with her use of shape and layering.  It is absolutely beautiful. (also she did costume designs for Frozen)

SO I decided to try to do a sketch using her style as an influence.  I had to have some sort of content for my illustration- so I looked up one of my favorite french fairytalests (I'm claiming that as a real word).  Madame Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont.  She wrote the original Beauty and the Beast- though not the one that became famous (that is a whole different story).  I thought of doing figures from Beauty and the Beast- but I feel like it is WAY over done- so I found another story she wrote called 'Aurore and Aimee'.  I could not find a good English translation of it- the best I found is Here and appears to be a student translation of the story.  The story is simple but seems like one that you could 'break' and have a lot of fun with in a retelling.  I'm not writing a book- so I didn't do that- I just drew the sisters from the story.

I wish I had more than an hour to spend on this (semester ends in 4 weeks- so most of that homework is taking priority over the blog at the moment- though I am trying to combine the two a bit).  I think I got a lot more of Britteny's style into the face of Aimee- although I think Aurore was the more successful design of the two.  Like just about everything I'm going to be posting this month, I want to come back to these characters after finals and flush out the details better and maybe even bring them up to the level of color illustrations.  One of the challenges I found in creating the two characters was getting them to look good and evil and also costuming! During the course of the story both girls end up becoming queens of different countries- so I tried to make their outfits correspond with both personal demeanor and country.  I feel like Aimee's dress should be far more decorative than it currently is... For sure will be revising these characters after finals.

Well that is it for today!

~Alicia