Happy Valentine´s Day to Sandcastle.fi blog readers ❤️

Here´s rose dresses for Valentine´s Day 2018…  Which one is your favourite, left or right?

Some days are just fulfilled with rosy thoughts… and again this year the Valentine´s Day became a day of roses.

To this Valentine´s Day illustration I designed  the two characters and their dresses with traditional Valentine´s Day colors and completed the dresses with real roses. This year I chose four different colored roses for the dresses including both warm and cooler colors.

Creating the rose dresses was almost like entering the rosy fairy tale world of the characters...

The character on left had her dress completed with deep red roses and lighter roses with shades of orange. The dress of the another character on the right was created with roses that had more cooler shades of pink and purple. I designed the dresses to have a bit of extra sense of layering when combining the different colored roses together.

The dresses were this time designed to have longer lace sleeves. The embroidery of the dresses was also hand drawn and the sparkling style started to remind a bit of the details of figure skating dresses... Maybe the ongoing Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang gave that extra twist also to the Valentine´s Day dresses 2018. 

I designed the character on the left with the deep red roses to have also darker hair with deep red highlights on the hair ends. That way also the hair is almost like having a bit of balayage effect. Also the top of the dress was colored with deep red color layers.

In the same time the lighter and a bit orange roses of the dress were lighting up the whole character. And a small detail was to add also that same brighter orange tone from the colored pencil as a makeup to the character´s eyelids.

And in the middle of all those roses, one can suddenly become aware of that one unique rose.

Like in the moment captured in picture below, when the lighter and a bit orange colored rose draws the attention and brightens the whole character - and the studio too.

The bright pink roses of the dress were lighting up the whole dress also in the design of the another character on the right. In this case the top of the dress was colored with cool pink and purple color layers to match the rose dress.

I designed this another character on the right to have blond hair with pink highlights. Also this character is having a bit of balayage effect on the hair ends, but in this case it is created with pink color. Some of the petals of the pink roses were also having that nice soft color that gave a lot of inspiration to the color choices and gave that soft tone also to the character´s hair. Those same colors could also be seen in the subtle changes of  character´s skin color. The eyes and eye “makeup” for this character were colored with light blue tones that were amplifying the cooler tones of the character and the dress.

The both characters were having their own style and look. But in the end it was also important to keep the both characters similar enough when presented together in the same illustration. Again it was all about unifying the characters but also to join the cool and warm roses into a one rosy story.

Finally the illustration was completed with the surrounding roses, petals and rose leaves.

Wishing a wonderful and rosy Valentine´s Day to all blog readers! ?❤️