Forging Nemo - pastel practice with Procreate App

Here are some sketches I did to try to replicate the beautiful pastel drawings of Ralph Eggleston from Finding Nemo.  So just to clarify, these are my humble attempts to copy his artwork, and I'm not trying to pass these off as my own original concepts. ;)

But why?  Why copy?  To climb into his brain.  Among the many massively talented artists who have worked on animated features, I've always been blown away by Ralph's pastels.  And I've always found pastels to be relaxing to work with.  By copying his artwork, I tried to get into his head and see how he made his color choices, to look at his strokes, and last of all to see if I could do it on the iPad.  More about that below.

I have to say that I'm loving the Procreate App for the iPad.  I may never paint in Photoshop again!  Here we have an app that actually competes with the Adobe giant, and in some ways, comes out on top.  Comparing it to PS for documents of the same size, Procreate handles intricate textured brushes better and with perfectly smooth frame rate.  It also combines some of the best brush settings of PS and Painter.  Oh and it has a smudge tool that isn't terribly laggy like PS, in Procreate it's exactly what it should be.  The app simulates most real media wonderfully, and you can bring your favorite PS stamps in to get the same brushes you use and love elsewhere.  And there's also something really nice about blending pastels with your finger...and not having to clean up afterwards.  In my opinion, no other app comes anywhere close.

I have the classic Adonit Jot stylus and I'm eagerly awaiting my Jot Touch 4 with palm rejection.  Until that ships, I've found that a simple DIY (i.e. free) palm rejection glove makes a world of a difference drawing on the iPad.  To create these paintings, I used the stock oil pastel brush, along with some modified duplicates to mimic some specific strokes I saw in the original pastels by Ralph Eggleston.

I searched the internet to find some pictures of the original artwork and put them below.  In each one the colors look surprisingly different from my printed copy of the book, but hopefully you see the resemblance.  It was a fun experiment, hope you enjoyed!