Finally, she's done!
"The flower that blooms in adversity
is the rarest and most beautiful of all"
Mulan was the winner of my poll to choose the next Disney Princess in my series. She's my favourite Disney princess right after Rapunzel, and drawing her was a major challenge - specially because my serie's aesthetics is based on traditional fairytale storybooks, and mixing that with chinese elements was not easy... But overall, I think I'm pleased.
The color scheme was very hard, since she wears at least 3 important outfits with different colors in the movie - first the green, yellow and blue one, then the pink and red from the matchmaker scene, and finally, the blue outfit from the final part of the movie. I tried to mix the first two to make something that could instantly say "Mulan" and also be fit for a soft, light kind of classical Hanfu.
The garnment itself was very fun to design, on the other hand. For the brief research I made (and please correct me if I'm saiyng nonsense...) I had the impression hanfu is far more open to shape variation than the japanese kimono. So I could use several hanfu pictures for inspiration, mix many ideas and come up with this flowy outfit with huuuge sleeves (who doesn't love huge sleeves? ^^)
On the details I focused on the peach blossoms and the peonia, both very popular flowers in chinese art tradition. Mulan's sword design in the movie is pretty cool, so I decided to keep it as the original. The sword and flowers are meant to symbolize both strong and gentle personality of Mulan. And the cloud background pattern... well, that was an obvious choice. ;D
So, suggestions for the next Princess?
