Silas Zee: Let It Go

Let It Go

2013.12.07

My first big Elsa piece was good but wasn't great, so I thought I'd give this another shot. I went with another bold pose, but a lot simpler one at the same time. I was having some trouble penciling the pose so I hit up my pal Katie and sent her a pic of the rough sketch to help me out. I really needed to see what the shoulder was doing with her arm raised up like this and how exactly her legs and hips were working here (Elsa's got some ba-da-boom hips, son!). Katie threw me back a reference photo that tweaked my sketch pose just enough to redraw the whole damn thing. XD

I ran with most of Katie's reference pic, namely stealing her pose with the hips and arms. For the colors I wanted to do some big, bold shading with the light source up top. I was gonna try to keep the outfit soft and close to the animation model but I'm just not that good at this digital painting thing yet and couldn't make it work with the heavy shadows that I wanted to pull it off here. A happy accident while playing with the darkness levels ended up giving me a really slick look with Elsa's dress so I just ran with it. I think I spent the most time trying to figure out how to shade her hair and what the hell to do with her cape. I had some trouble shading her skirt so I used Chelsea as a lighting model for this piece (she doesn't mind me holding a flashlight over her head for hours on end as long as I keep the Oreos coming).