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MysticSparkleWings — Bratz 20th Anniversary
Published: 2021-05-21 17:18:45 +0000 UTC; Views: 5932; Favourites: 34; Downloads: 0
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Ho boy this feels like...AN EVENT, finally posting this piece. Which it kind of is, I'm just not used to feeling this way when I post art. It's kinda nice, just also very weird. [Settle in, I can already tell this description is going to be massive.]Anyway. Like the title [and the art!] says, today, per the official Bratz Instagram page , is the brand's 20th Anniversary. 20 Years. Pause while me and several others take a moment to feel old... And since I'm finally back into a regular art-making routine while also making up for lost time and other anniversaries I've missed this year, I knew I had to make something. And I had a little bit of experience drawing in Bratz's style for the Art Style Challenge , as well as some sketches that never saw the light of day.
Also, I have to personally applaud Bratz for posting about the anniversary a whole 3 weeks in advance; Enough time for me to make something, but not so far ahead of time that I wouldn't remember. Please, can more brands and people do this? Us slower & busier artists want to get in on the fun too, we just need enough time!
Back to the matter at hand; The anniversary feels more personal than some of the others I've made stuff for, and I wanted to reflect that in the art. I may have had more Barbies than Bratz dolls as a kid, but I remember appreciating a lot of the details that separated Bratz more. Barbie rarely used actual denim, for example, whereas Bratz did. Barbie's teeny tiny doll accessories were usually a bit plainer...stuff like that. All very small, and Barbie definitely won out in terms of how posable the dolls were back then, but there is something to be said for the extra personality edge Bratz had that Barbie likely never will.
So when I started thinking up ideas, immediately I wanted to go for one or some of the dolls I actually had (and still have...somewhere, they got put in a storage box specifically marked "KEEP" several, several years ago when we moved). My first thought, which may make an unsettling amount of sense if you're familiar with my personality in the present, was Pretty N Punk Yasmin , who is easily the Bratz doll I remember the most strongly out of any of them. [And shockingly, that was the only Pretty N Punk doll I ever got. I assume they were just hard to find because I'm almost positive if I or my parents had seen them again I would've gotten more after the first one was such a hit. But I remember picking Yasmin out myself at the store.]
I may still end up drawing PNP Yasmin at some point because of how iconic she is in my memory, aside from just thinking it would be fun, but after some thought and talking to some friends, I decided instead it would be better to go with the first Bratz dolls I remember having...at all. It's totally possible I had others before these, but the first Bratz dolls I remember owning were 4 of the "Step Out" dolls, which were somewhat ironically made for Bratz's 5th Anniversary: Cloe, Jade, Meygan, and Sasha.
How I ended up with Meygen to round out the 4 instead of Yasmin, I'm not sure. Most likely something to do with how the store my parents got them from stocked them, but I really have no idea. But I think even back then I recognized the "mistake" when I opened the dolls because I figured out Yasmin wasn't supposed to have red hair.
This is also just super ironic when combined: The only Pretty N Punk doll I ever got was Yasmin, but she was the one missing from my main first [as far as I remember] dolls.
Still, you're probably wondering why there're only 2 out of 4 here. Primarily, time. I had plenty of advance notice, yes, but I know how slow I am and how trying to manage my time with bigger projects normally goes. I had to make some sacrifices if I wanted to finish this and be happy with it by the anniversary. But the whole Meygan/Yasmin thing also meant even if I had felt like I had time, I would've had to make a choice: Draw them both for a total of 5 girls, Draw the one true to me, or Draw the one true to the brand? A choice I didn't feel like making anyway. Plus, this leaves the door open to draw the others at another time if I want to, possibly with more time so drawing Sasha, Meygen, and Yasmin is more manageable.
So then why these two, in these outfits?
Cloe was 100% my favorite as a kid, and I still have the strongest attachment to her now. Jade was usually my second favorite. The Step-Out dolls all came with a "default" outfit the girls were already wearing, and a secondary outfit; Cloe here is in her default outfit, Jade her secondary. Cloe's Top and Jade's Dress were two of my absolute favorite Bratz clothes I owned, and I remember the way they look and the textures super clearly. Cloe's top may have actually been my single most favorite doll clothing item ever.
[I also remember very clearly that one of Jade's straps for her dress broke on mine, and so from then on I had to either let the chain hang free or tuck it into the top of her dress, so here I made one strap off-shoulder as a little nod to that.]
Bonus: I picked these poses after what is the most iconic Bratz official artwork in my mind:[link] , which I was exposed to via the "Bratz Fashion Designer" Flash Game, and the background and somewhat the coloring style were inspired by the "Bratz Makeover Game ."
Once all that was decided, My process was fairly simple and one you've seen from me before:
Now, I feel it necessary to point out here that I already noticed it seems like the Bratz official artwork doesn't really have a consistent style between doll lines back when I did the Art Style Challenge, and strangely as I poked around for references for this, I noticed that inconsistency is...kinda everwhere with Bratz? The art styles aren't consistent, often the dolls/characters themselves aren't consistent in appearance (Sometimes Yasmin has a darker, "more ethnic" skin tone, sometimes she's not much darker than Jade or Cloe, sometimes Cloe is "the blond with a tan," sometimes she's as pale as I am, etc.), the photos of the dolls aren't necessarily consistent with what you get...the list goes on. Honestly, as weird as it is, I don't really mind? It's just so unusual for a brand to not want to make sure all that stuff is as consistent as possible.
This did baffle me as a kid though. The Step-Out dolls in particular do not match the artwork on their boxes at all [except for Jade's who matches her default outfit, and though not pictured in that link, Meygan's does match her secondary outfit], and the weirdest thing is doll Cloe and doll Jade's hairstyles are...similar to their official doll photos [the ones that were printed on the posters the dolls came with], But Poster Jade's is wilder and Poster Cloe's is tamer. Jade seems to have an extra bit of "spikey" hair and Cloe seems to be lacking the short curls in the front of her ponytail, as well as her loose strand is either tucked into her ponytail or otherwise just...gone.
I'd already decided I was going to draw the dolls as I knew them, so the posters and artwork were no help in figuring out how to draw the hair [and the jewelry, but we'll talk about that later], but even so I think I managed well enough in the end. Cloe's is a bit weird, but I couldn't think of a way to draw it that didn't look even weirder, so here we are.
Also, I was totally lost on how to translate Jade's shoes into this visual style, so with no references I just winged it to the best of my ability. The actual doll shoes are just so very pointy, but the way Bratz feet are drawn is so much daintier, less angular. Not an easy thing to balance out.
Cloe's earrings probably also look...stiff, odd? Eh. I couldn't find a good clear photo that really showed off the detail, so I did the best I could.
Moving on. I tried not to get too crazy with the line-inking since a fair amount [with some notable exceptions] of the official art with black lines has some line variation, but nothing too crazy. Though, as I mentioned, the ink did get away from me in a few spots.
Jade's chin and her left (our right) cheek suffered the worst from that. Cloe's right (our left) outer thigh also took a hit, but it worked out much better after my attempt to fix it. In both places, I covered the excess ink with a white pen made for writing on glass, which usually leaves a slightly more matte surface than my white gel pen and was less trouble than hauling out actual paint. The alcohol markers covered and blended on Cloe's leg way better than I expected, but it looked totally gross on Jade's face, so I had to fix it digitally later. [Fortunately, it was really easy to fix in the digital realm.]
Speaking of the alcohol markers: Loyal Sparklers probably remember I'm somewhat of a stickler for color accuracy. That actually wasn't the problem I was expecting with this piece, since the subjects were originally physical dolls and their colors can shift depending on lighting, so "close enough" is usually plenty "good enough." Though, I was conflicted about the girls' hair and eye colors.
Remember those inconsistencies I mentioned before? Cloe isn't so bad; Really any variation of "blonde with blue eyes," will do, I just had to decide what I wanted. Jade on the other hand...Sometimes her hair is jet-black, sometimes it's more of a brownish-black. Sometimes her eyes are green, sometimes they're brown or gray. Her eye color is listed as "brown" on the Bratz Wikia, but I thought I remembered them being green, then found out her Step-Out artwork does have green eyes, but the actual doll's eyes are more on the gray side.
My solution was to split the difference as best I could and make her eyes a dark-ish hazel, mixing a very olive green and brown, then using a very light grey-green pencil to add the highlight to the iris. From a distance, the color is very murky and gray-ish, but the green shows more clearly when you zoom in, so I'd say that's mission accomplished.
Jade's dress was also tricky to get the right tone, but that was a problem I invited for myself because of the shade I remember the dress being. And despite my efforts, I did still end up adjusting it a bit in Photoshop, and it's arguably still not right, but I'm pretty sure I'm the only one who cares. [Similarly, I got a little carried away with the shading on Cloe's jeans and had to lighten them a bit.]
And while we're on "why was Jade 5x more complicated than Cloe," I made a big stupid mistake very early when I started coloring. I grabbed the base-red marker for Cloe's lips...and I colored Jade's lips with it.
I didn't even realize what I'd done until I put the marker down and went to pick up another.
Thus, I was excruciatingly careful from then on to make sure I was using the correct marker in the correct area.
I did manage to do better at fixing this traditionally than I'd thought possible. Several careful coats of a colorless blender marker lightened the red until it was close-ish to the base pink I needed, then I did my best to shade and use pencils to fix it the rest of the way. Ultimately? Not bad, but the tone wasn't quite right and they were still a bit too dark for my liking, so they got a digital adjustment too.
The last color-related digital fix I had to make was Cloe's hair, but I kinda saw that coming. I just don't have quite the right marker or pencil colors at my disposal for very light blonde hair, and I still opted to leave this a little more goldish than it maybe should be, but as I said before, Cloe's character variation means most any color recognizable as "blonde" is good enough for her.
Jade's hair actually ended up hitting something a sweet spot between that brownish-black and a pure black, at to my eyes. That was really nice, even if I realized later I'd drawn the braid at the top of her ponytail probably too small.
Additionally, you can't tell on the scan, but the flower near Cloe's shoulder did actually see a couple of metallic pencils (and gel pen, which I'll address next) since that feature on the doll was a black-backed silver.
Now, about those gel pens.
I used my silver Sparkle Pop for Jade's details and the red one for Cloe's shoes. Unfortunately, a lot of Jade's jewelry overlapped with her dark hair and the silver almost entirely disappeared when I scanned the drawing. Instead of fighting with it, I just gave up and traced over the lingering ink lines digitally, then added some texturing to get a similar effect to what the gel pen was supposed to look like. Cloe's shoes were totally fine though, dare I say that red pen was perfect.
Worthy of note is also that I did try adding the shine to their eyes with white gel pen, but the placement was totally off and they just generally looked wonky, so I had to re-do those digitally too.
Normally, I'm not open to quite so many digital adjustments, but not only did I have a specific vision to capture, I had also decided way way early, before I was even properly sketching the girls, that I wanted to handle the background digitally.
Admittedly, my original plans for the background were pretty different. I did still have the sunset-ish gradient in mind, but the text over it was just going to say either, "20 years of Passion & Fashion" or "20 years of Passion 4 [or for] Fashion," I hadn't decided yet. And that floating box-rim-thing wasn't in the plans. However, when I actually started messing around with it, I tried various things I won't bore you with all the details of, and noted some changes had to be made anyway since my original ideas just didn't look very good, aside from some things I just tried randomly and was really happy with the results, so I kept them.
The things about the background I do feel are worth specifying:
Also: While not a total cakewalk, it was easier than I expected to cleanly remove the white paper from behind Cloe and Jade, which was nice.
Would you believe that's still not everything I could talk about here? Yet I think it would behoove me to start trying to wrap this up rather than go into ever further minute detail. 
I'm sure you can probably tell by the care I poured into this piece, even with the faults I'm sure it still has, how much Bratz meant to me as a kid and what it still means to me now. I don't buy dolls that often anymore for various reasons, but I do have a couple of the newer Bratz dolls from the 2015 reboot, and I can't tell you guys how happy it made me to see when I got them that other than the new knee-joints and slightly different plastic, they were virtually indistinguishable from the Bratz dolls I had when I was little. I didn't like some of the marketing ploys I saw on the store shelves for the various reboots, but the quality of the dolls themselves is way more important.
The new Bratz dolls didn't come into my possession until after we saw the disaster that was the Monster High reboot in 2016, and between that and just walking down the Barbie aisle without buying anything showing me how far those doll's quality has sunk, it was so nice to see at least one "old but trying to be new" doll line hadn't totally thrown in the towel.
Bratz has quite literally come and gone several times over the years (thanks in no small part to Mattel's legal team, I'm sure, a story for another time), but as long as they continue to be a shining example of consistent quality (even if nothing else is consistent, as we've discussed
), they will always have my support as a brand. Moreover, even if the quality changes, nothing can erase the part they played in shaping me as a very young child. For that alone, I will probably always be happy to have an excuse to make some Bratz art. 
To that end, a very happy 20th Anniversary to our girls; Cloe, Jade, Yasmin, Sasha. May that passion for fashion be forever alive and strong!
[And a happy Friday to the rest of you that could not possibly care less, though I have no idea how you made it to the end of this description!
] Artwork (c) me, MysticSparkleWings
I do not own any of the copyrighted properties shown, nor do I claim to
Where to find me & my artwork:
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