Hi, everyone! Happy September 1st! 🍁

I hope everyone had a fun, spectacular summer this year, with August departing this week, until we meet summer again by next year. Although we'll still get plenty of warm weather before we can reach for the first day of fall later on in the late-week of the month, but nothing can stop us for thinking about the nice things on autumn with cooler weather, leaves changing color to warm colors, pumpkin spice coffee, football games, and all that jazz. And speaking of jazz, that's coming here on today's very new topic, here's a fan art drawing of a self-portrait of myself as one of the little souls from Disney/Pixar's film, Soul (2020).

If you are familiar with the movie, which I'm pretty sure many of you have already seen it on Disney+, or those who haven't seen it yet, you'll probably find the art style very recognizable, just like any of the trailers and/or clips from Soul, featuring little animated souls from The Great Before. This drawing is also part of an art challenge called 'Soulsona'.

What is Soulsona? It's basically a fun art challenge that artists can work on by doing drawings of self-portraits as little souls, based on the film Soul, just like how we see Joe Gardner, the main protagonist in the film, when he first became a little soul entering The Great Before, after he falls into the sewer hole and dies. You can draw yourself as little soul in the same art design as how they were animated in the movie, and perhaps mix it with your own art style, and share it on social media.

This happens to be the very first time I've got to worked on this particular art challenge, and it was super cool to see myself drawn in the style of Soul, and even right after I have finished it, I was geeking out. Surprising enough, this is the first topic featuring a self-portrait artwork that I ever presented here on this blog.

I definitely recommended watching Soul to any one out there, even if you are a Pixar fan, it's a brilliant movie with heart and soul, which is an excellent way to say it for myself. It's available to watch on Disney+. This movie is directed by Pete Docter, a Pixar legend, who directed a list of extraordinary Pixar movies, such as Monsters' Inc. (2001) and Up (2009), and co-directed by Kemp Powers, features the voices of Jamie Foxx as Joe Gardner and Tina Fey as 22, and it has jazz music arrangements by Jon Bastille. I've seen this movie many times, and I really like it! I like the story about one man who has this great passion for jazz music, he really wants that dream of being a great jazz player, in spite for being a middle school music teacher, but as Joe Gardner dies and enters The Great Before to meeting 22, the little soul who has no desire to go to Earth, they come together and learn a powerful lesson on living life and enjoying life, and what are you more than just what you are good at. The characters are fun and amazing. I really like the animation, especially for the souls and the counselors, the way they are designed, they're very Picasso-like and I like the lighting the animators used to put in such realistic glow that the colors just vibrant together like radiation. The colors and design were super incredible, I really like the colors they worked on for The Great Before, it's all about blue, but it's like electric blue mix with bits of pink and purple, adding with much lighter contrast than darker contrast. And the music is really cool, it goes from jazz to electric, kinda like how you listen to electric music from a video game, but it really fits.

And I think it's a great movie I also recommended to people with autism, because I think you can definitely learn something on what truly inspires on who you are, what you are made of, and what is your purpose. What is about autism that makes it part of inside of our souls? That's a very good question. I don't know. But there is something out there. To me, these characters are very relatable, especially with both Joe and 22. Joe wants to reach this goal on becoming a jazz musician, but in the end he learns that it's more than being a jazz player, it's about enjoying life he had over the years from a child to an adult. For 22, we see that why she doesn't like Earth, because she's afraid of not knowing what her main purpose is suppose to be, but she discovers that there's more that you can love and enjoy about having life as a human being. Either way, that's part of having a soul inside of ourselves, and adding a great lesson for all of us! 😉

Getting Started the Project/Rough Drawing

Okay! So let's get started on learning about the process on how I came to work on my very own Soul fan art portrait, known as Soulsona or #soulsona 💙

This was done in full digital drawing, drawn on Autodesk SketchBook at 1390 x 1080, horizontal view. The first part of the job on working this project is always started out with a simple rough sketch in pencil. I started working on my own Soulsona art challenge on a Tuesday afternoon, using a pencil tool in blue for a light sketching before detailing the entire drawing, so I can draw what would I like or see myself as a soul from The Great Before. Even before getting started on drawing my own Soul avatar, I did get a chance to look at some little bits of other Soulsona challenge drawings each artists would post, but where I found it was on Google, and also trying to find few images of the movie, so that way I can use each as reference to use the right color keys, including for shadows and light, and caricatured myself in drawing with the exact colors as how the souls were designed and animated in the film.

I sketched my little Soul avatar, including the little animator's desk and pencil logo, with the pencil tool, both in blue and black on Autodesk SketchBook. The blue pencil was used for light sketching, such as sketching the lines and shapes for location of the eyes, hands, and body; the black pencil was for detailing, after sketching with the blue pencil. While drawing, I took out one of the pictures, when I was vacationing at Asheville, North Carolina with my relatives to visit the Biltmore Estate from two years ago, that way I can draw and capturing each of my parts and details.

I thought it would be cool to sketch it out the animator's desk and pencil, which I drew it on a separate layer, and place it on the left side behind my avatar, just to represent on who I am and what are my talents.

Clean-Up Drawing/Shadows and Light

Now I've already drew my Soul portrait and the animator's desk/pencil logo, the next part of the job is getting the entire rough drawing, and turning it into a nice clean-up drawing. This was drawn on separate layer, drawn with the pen tool in black, and these drawings of the avatar and animator's desk were both drawn together on the same layer. I did use the geometric shapes tool to clean up the rough lines and shapes of the animator's desk and pencil, which was easy for me to do, particularly on the rounded desk, where animators would work their artistry by animating on paper.

Once that was done, I begin sketching the locations of shadows and light around my avatar, going back using the pencil tool in blue, drawn on another separate layer.

The reason why I did a clean-up drawing by using black smooth lines, even though you didn't see much of outlines drawn for the final look of the drawing, just like how you see it at the beginning of this topic, was because it would be tricky to use mix of two blue colors for smoother lines, and once I would start painting it in color, as well as adding shadows and light on a separate layer on the bottom, and some of the blue lines would be seen throughout the darker colors for shadows. With that, I can use it as a guide to paint around the clean-up drawing, so it kinda looks like it's designed in 3D animation, but still having the classic digital drawing look, but with very detailed shadows and light, like how we see CGI animated films today, including Pixar.

Blue-Light Vibrate Background

I went back to this project the next day, and the next part was painting the background, making it very vibrated by using mix of light and dark contrast in blue. From watching the movie, I think blue is the main color for The Great Before, while the main color of the souls is aqua-blue or light blue, mixed with green and blue, and bit of white that they would vibrate together. It's like I said at the beginning, it reminds me of some kind of radiation with colors of light vibrating together. I took Astronomy and Astronomy Lab classes for the spring semester in college, during my fourth year at Kent State Stark, and we learned about light radiation, like white, yellow-white, red, blue-white, and violet (correct me if I'm wrong, it's been four years since I took that class). That's what kinda reminds me of, even when I watch the movie, you can see how very vibrate these colors are, going from very bright to light and colorful to dark contrast altogether.

What I did was taking the paint bucket tool, going from the color vibration, which you can do it either in vertical or horizontal view, click it on the background and paint it, and then take both color editor and copic color for ultimatum blue, going from bright to dark. Afterwards, I darken the blue, and paint the bottom with the spray paint tool, and even added bit of shadows, so the bottom would appear to be a floor.

Then the last thing to add onto the background was the animator's desk and pencil logo, and painted it in white, using both paintbrush and spray paint tool for light glowing effects. Originally it was gonna be done on the same layer, where I paint the background, but it didn't work out, even whenever I need to erase or not, because some parts of the background would erase. So that was done on another layer, tracing it from the clean-up drawing in white, and paint the glowing light with the spray paint.

Painting Soul Avatar in Color

With the blue vibrate background painted. it was time to get my little Soul avatar in color. Like I've said from the clean-up drawing section, I would take the clean-up drawing and tone it done a bit, meaning to make it like it's appearing a bit invisible, and onto another separate layer, I would paint my avatar in two colors of aqua-blue (face, body, arms, hands, legs, and feet) and blue (hair) and dark blue (eyebrows & eyelashes), along with white, hazel, and black for my eyes, because I have hazel eyes. The art tool I use was a paintbrush.

Painting Shadows and Light/Finishing Touches

The last part of the project, even after getting my avatar painted in color, was painting the locations of shadows and light vibrating around the avatar together. The tool I used was the spray paint tool, so I can paint both the shadows and light very detailed and realistic. The shadows were mostly done in blue, and the light were mixed in combination of white, light-green, and bit of pink, which you can see it from the left cheek to the layer on my hair. I even made my avatar glowing with both light and shadows since the souls from The Great Before glow with bit of light, and the counselors also glow with light. Every set in The Great Before is surrounded by light.

Now that the shadows and light were painted around my avatar, the final touch was drawing the outlines, meaning my mouth, glasses, bits of lines of each parts of the bangs from my hair, and fingers for each of the hands.

The drawing was finished on a Wednesday afternoon, on August 25th. This project took me a day to work on it. It was so much fun doing a self-portrait fan art, based on one of my favorite Pixar animated films, and if you wanna try drawing your own Soulsona art challenge, go for it! It's fun for any artist, especially for any one who is a Disney and Pixar fan. Drawing does take a lot of practice, but it doesn't mean it has to be perfect. It's about trying new things, and be inspired by it.

I hope you all enjoyed the self-portrait drawing on today's new topic. It was fun, and I am very happy on how it looks. What are your thoughts on Pixar's Soul? Who are your favorite characters? Favorite quotes? And your favorite scenes? Please share your thoughts in the comments down below.

Take care! 😇

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