Here they are! The one and only art collection of my three artworks of the ballet Pas de Quatre, all drawn in three different, separated art mediums, as presented on today’s new topic. From one of the last, previous topics that I’ve posted back in last June, I introduced you to one of my very first drawing sketch of this ballet, as part of one of my upcoming projects, along with my kitten pencil drawings and telling you that I’m planning to do another animation project on animals, after working on my animation test of a rabbit run cycle. I have done some bit of work of my kitten animation, but there were some bit of challenges that I would, at some point, need to go back and fix it. However, I think I’m gonna save the kitten animation later on, whenever I’m ready to go back, due to another animation project that I went back to work on. The best thing for me, when it comes to animating animals, is to focus on their walk cycle, and so, if I need to learn how to animate a cat, I have to know their walk cycle. Lucky for me, being a cat owner, I can videotaped my cat, Charlotte walking around the house to capture, not just her own walk cycle, but to capture how a real-life cat walks. Animation does take a while, even if it’s a pencil test or a short, it does take a while, but if you’re making an animated movie, that would take about a year or two to completed, and animating a character can be very hard, but as long as you enjoy it, then you will love the process of it and be proud of your amazing talent. Hopefully, whenever I’ve decided to go back to animating animals, if I can videotaped my cat’s walk cycle, then I’ll work on that, and maybe show it here on this blog first, before I can do my animation of a kitten playing a yarn for the first time.
On today’s new topic, we will go and dive over to a small art gallery of my three artwork collection of the Pas de Quatre ballet drawings, drawn in three different mediums: pen, watercolor, and digital drawing. With same four ballerinas in same poses, same costumes, and very same design in my animation style.
The Story Behind the Ballet: What is Pas de Quatre?
Needless to say, that’s definitely a very good question, only for those who have never seen this ballet, such as myself. According to my research, as I picked it up from my own copy of the textbook Ballet by Viviana Durante, Pas de Quatre has no story, no plot, except it has a list of four ballerinas, all dressed up in their white Romantic costumes and long tutus, danced together, and each ballerina will dance her own solo (or variation). It is a Romantic ballet piece, along with two of the famous Romantic ballets, such as La Sylphide and Giselle, first premiered in 1845 and choreographed by Jules Perrot, who was one of the choreographers for the iconic piece, Giselle.
I can say that, even though I have never seen it before, it does look similar to the ballet La Sylphide, because of their beautiful, white costume and tutus, and adding with pink roses as headpieces and pearls for jewelry, but unlike the sylphides, they don’e have butterfly-like wings, so they couldn’t come out in ghostly appearances, like the wilis from Giselle. I actually found out about this ballet from the Ballet textbook on one page from the Romantic Ballet section, which features a picture of a lithograph of the original dancers, done back in 1845, and there was also a black and white image, taken in 1954, and so that lead me an inspiration to learn how to draw the four leading ballerinas dancing Pas de Quatre.
Drawing Medium 1: Original Rough Sketch in Pen-on-Paper
This is my very first drawing of Pas de Quatre ballet, drawn in black pen on paper, the very first art medium I’ve worked on. After seeing an image of the original 1845 lithograph and the black and white image from 1954, I just sit down and did a fun sketch to see how it looks in my animation style. I think I must’ve drew this sketch back in February, before deciding to do two more drawings of the same ballet in different art form.
So this is the one that started it all!
Like I’ve said, at the beginning of this topic, I posted this exact pen drawing on my previous topic back in June, which was part of one of my upcoming projects, both this and the cat animation project, titled ‘Upcoming Projects 4: Animating Animals 2/Pas de Quatre (3 different mediums)’. If you haven’t seen it nor read it, you can find it here on The Autistic Animator’s Desk, and learn more about these projects.
Drawing Medium 2: Watercolor
The second Pas de Quatre drawing, drawn and painted in watercolor. Not only this became the second drawing, based on this Romantic ballet piece, but it became the very first one to be shown in beautifully, full color.
This project of doing a watercolor version of the drawing had started around last March. While I was working on it, I wanted to do something different and make it a little bit special, and so, instead of just actually drawing and painting around the entire scale on the page of my drawing pad, I sketched a bit of a large rectangular scale, adding to a thick border on the paper, kind of like making a little frame, in which you’ll see the small-view image down below (a better way for me to show it to you than just explaining, because sometimes I have a hard time explaining things to people, due to my autism and grammar). I have some good experiences on doing watercolor projects like that, way back from my first year as a college student at Kent State University at Stark. I took a 2D art class, and we would do some watercolor paintings by adding a frame-like borders by putting long, straps of tape around the square or rectangular lines, so the painting will come out like that.
I was able to clean up the sketch with the black ink pen and do a little bit of coloring with my watercolor pencil set, but didn’t do much of it, because some of the pencils were starting to shorting in more with so much sharpening, mostly for the white pencil. So it took me a while to stop the project till I can go out and buy a new watercolor pencil sets. No worries, I’ve already bought a new nice set of watercolor pencils, but it didn’t come with a white pencil, but luckily, I bought a white, water-based brush, which it’ll be nice to use for watercolor, because it’s water-based, so I think it’ll brush and behaved like a form of watercolor medium. By then, I went back to this project, and painted it, along with the white water-based brush for the costume and tutus, and it works really well. And I did use it for my other watercolor projects, too.
I really like it how it turned out. I think it would make it into a really nice and beautiful drawing to put it in frame, and hang it on a wall. It’s not just a drawing, but just a beautiful artwork.
Drawing Medium 3: Digital Drawing
At last, but not least, the third drawing of Pas de Quatre, drawn as a full-scale digital drawing, done in Autodesk SketchBook software. Although it looks quite very similar to the watercolor version of the ballet drawing, due to the very same design and colors for the dancers and the background, but there’s a little bit of differences between these two drawings, such as the shadows around them.
Getting started on drawing this ballet piece on Autodesk SketchBook wasn’t easy, at first. The first time on drawing the four ballerinas was starting off by drawing each ballerina at a time in each separated layers. As usual, I always lightly sketch the character before going on to detailing, and so, I had to do the exact same process for the other three ballerinas while sketching them in separated layers, so I can move them without moving two or three dancers at the same time. If you’ll noticed the three other ballerinas bending down, while intertwining their hands together like playing ringing-around-the-roses around the main ballerina who is standing en pointe, that was the hardest part, because they have to be drawn and be together, while they’re being sketched in separated layers, and it has to be realistic without making it too funny nor cartoony. So, I end up restarting the drawings over again, and doing it for the second time was starting to come forward. Once that the light sketching in four separated layers was done, I went on to another separated layer, and then detailing the whole drawing altogether.
The next process, from sketching to detailing the rough drawings, is to clean up the drawing. During that, I went on to use different dark colors to cleaning up the lines on the rough drawings for different locations, including for brighter colors on the costumes, and even white for cleaning up the lines for the tutus. Although it might be hard for you, as a viewer, to see the white lines drawn for the tutus, because of the color, but you’ll know they’re here, kinda like the white lines drawn on Cinderella’s ballgown from the Disney animated classic; the way it was drawn onto a cel, drawn with white ink, and painted with very bright-gray paint on the back (only to make the dress like it’s silver with white patterns, because it’s very sparkly). I even added white, clean-up lines on the dancer’s puffed sleeves to make them pop out with the invisible white digital paint, so you can barely see half of their arms.
The background is the same color as I’ve used for the watercolor drawing, but added with a bit of vibration of more light and bit of dark on the bottom. The digital painting was mostly all done by hand with the Wacom tablet with the paintbrush tool, little bit with the paint bucket tool to click on different locations of the drawing to make the color pop right in, but sometimes it’ll make the whole color coming out to cover up the entire drawing, and that’s why I had to use the paintbrush tool to paint by hand, and the spray can tool for adding the shadows on the dancers. The drawing was finally finished last week, on August 6th.
Which would you say, out of these three ballet drawings, is your most favorite? Do you like the original pen-on-paper sketch? Watercolor drawing? Or the full digital drawing? If you have a favorite, please leave your comments and share your thoughts and feelings about it.
Hope you’ll enjoy the drawings, as much as looking at the gallery and reading to learn more about the process. Take care, and stay safe! 🙂
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