HOME | DD

Description
How much in commonality is there between a fiery girl and a watery boy?

Last Thursday, Pixar unveiled the teaser trailer for their upcoming 2023 film, Elemental. This film is set in a world where the citizens are made of one of the four main elements on Earth: water, fire, earth (as in dirt or plants), and air/wind. The story is set on two individuals: a woman made of fire named Ember, and a man made of water named Wade. When these two random strangers meet each other, they discover that they have more in common than they think, even though what they're made of are complete opposites of each other. The film will be directed by Peter Sohn, who previously directed one of Pixar's lower-tier films, The Good Dinosaur, and based this film on his family's emigration from Korea to New York, and his experiences growing up in said state.

As to be expected with anything related to Pixar, Elemental is currently my most anticipated film of 2023. It's not just the fact that it's made by Pixar, but like with a majority of the films released in the 2020 decade, I love how the basis of this story was inspired by the director's upbringing (like how Dan Scanlon implemented what it was like to grow up without a father in Onward, Enrico Casarosa showcasing a summer in 1950s Italy in Luca, and Domee Shi giving a unique twist to growing up in Canada in Turning Red). Another thing that this film has that's got my attention hooked is the animation, which is, unsurprisingly, absolutely fantastic. In a way, I'm getting a lot of Inside Out and Soul vibes from the film, with how the characters have their own unique individual shapes, and how they interact with each other. Lastly, this is the first time Pixar is doing a full-fledged romance story. Initially, I was going to say that WALL-E was Pixar's first romance-based film, but the more I think about it, the more I believe that the romance wasn't the main plot point of the film, as it was more focused on trying to get the humans back to Earth. I also think that, with the type of story the film is presenting, it could showcase some interesting allegories regarding romantic relationships between different races. So overall, those are my reasons on why I'm highly anticipating for this film.

Now onto the artwork!

Inspired by eagc7 's artwork of Ember, I wanted to try and push my limits on how I wanted to draw the characters. Because the characters are made of natural elements in the world, I knew that having flat colors and visible outlines wouldn't do this artwork justice. Luckily, there's a certain brush in Photoshop where the opacity of my brush strokes depends on how hard I press my tablet pen. What also helped was that it was a soft brush, so it allowed the characters' bodies to seamlessly flow off the edges instead of having a hard edge. Perhaps the character I had the most fun drawing was Ember, since her body has more erratic movements because of how she's made of fire. I definitely had fun with the way the fire just burns off her body, especially when it comes to drawing and blending the colors of those areas.

When it comes to Wade, he was proven to be just as much of a challenge to make as Ember. While Ember has erratic movements with her fire body, Wade is made of something that could be seen through and has parts of his body that can reflect light. Because he was translucent, I had to take into account what would be behind him, and the one thing that I did have to take into account was the back of Wade's shirt.

The last thing I want to talk about in this artwork is the glow around the characters. Trying to add them in was a little more difficult than I thought, despite how easy it looks and how much I've done it in the past. The reason why this was different was because when I was coloring in the characters, instead of using the eraser to get rid of the stray parts that I didn't want, I just used the black brush, since it would blend in with the black background. However, it didn't dawn on me that those black brush strokes would get in the way of the characters' glows. So, after some hard thinking, I used the magic wand tool to select the black brush strokes and erased them. While I'm certain that I didn't get rid of all the brush strokes, at least I was able to remove the more glaring ones so that they don't become that much of a distraction.

That's all there is to say here. Hope you like this artwork, and what are your first thoughts on Elemental? I've already given my two cents on the film, and I can't wait to see and learn more about this film in the upcoming months, especially when it hits theaters on June 16, 2023.

Description
How much in commonality is there between a fiery girl and a watery boy?

Last Thursday, Pixar unveiled the teaser trailer for their upcoming 2023 film, Elemental. This film is set in a world where the citizens are made of one of the four main elements on Earth: water, fire, earth (as in dirt or plants), and air/wind. The story is set on two individuals: a woman made of fire named Ember, and a man made of water named Wade. When these two random strangers meet each other, they discover that they have more in common than they think, even though what they're made of are complete opposites of each other. The film will be directed by Peter Sohn, who previously directed one of Pixar's lower-tier films, The Good Dinosaur, and based this film on his family's emigration from Korea to New York, and his experiences growing up in said state.

As to be expected with anything related to Pixar, Elemental is currently my most anticipated film of 2023. It's not just the fact that it's made by Pixar, but like with a majority of the films released in the 2020 decade, I love how the basis of this story was inspired by the director's upbringing (like how Dan Scanlon implemented what it was like to grow up without a father in Onward, Enrico Casarosa showcasing a summer in 1950s Italy in Luca, and Domee Shi giving a unique twist to growing up in Canada in Turning Red). Another thing that this film has that's got my attention hooked is the animation, which is, unsurprisingly, absolutely fantastic. In a way, I'm getting a lot of Inside Out and Soul vibes from the film, with how the characters have their own unique individual shapes, and how they interact with each other. Lastly, this is the first time Pixar is doing a full-fledged romance story. Initially, I was going to say that WALL-E was Pixar's first romance-based film, but the more I think about it, the more I believe that the romance wasn't the main plot point of the film, as it was more focused on trying to get the humans back to Earth. I also think that, with the type of story the film is presenting, it could showcase some interesting allegories regarding romantic relationships between different races. So overall, those are my reasons on why I'm highly anticipating for this film.

Now onto the artwork!

Inspired by eagc7 's artwork of Ember, I wanted to try and push my limits on how I wanted to draw the characters. Because the characters are made of natural elements in the world, I knew that having flat colors and visible outlines wouldn't do this artwork justice. Luckily, there's a certain brush in Photoshop where the opacity of my brush strokes depends on how hard I press my tablet pen. What also helped was that it was a soft brush, so it allowed the characters' bodies to seamlessly flow off the edges instead of having a hard edge. Perhaps the character I had the most fun drawing was Ember, since her body has more erratic movements because of how she's made of fire. I definitely had fun with the way the fire just burns off her body, especially when it comes to drawing and blending the colors of those areas.

When it comes to Wade, he was proven to be just as much of a challenge to make as Ember. While Ember has erratic movements with her fire body, Wade is made of something that could be seen through and has parts of his body that can reflect light. Because he was translucent, I had to take into account what would be behind him, and the one thing that I did have to take into account was the back of Wade's shirt.

The last thing I want to talk about in this artwork is the glow around the characters. Trying to add them in was a little more difficult than I thought, despite how easy it looks and how much I've done it in the past. The reason why this was different was because when I was coloring in the characters, instead of using the eraser to get rid of the stray parts that I didn't want, I just used the black brush, since it would blend in with the black background. However, it didn't dawn on me that those black brush strokes would get in the way of the characters' glows. So, after some hard thinking, I used the magic wand tool to select the black brush strokes and erased them. While I'm certain that I didn't get rid of all the brush strokes, at least I was able to remove the more glaring ones so that they don't become that much of a distraction.

That's all there is to say here. Hope you like this artwork, and what are your first thoughts on Elemental? I've already given my two cents on the film, and I can't wait to see and learn more about this film in the upcoming months, especially when it hits theaters on June 16, 2023.