Belle - Flawed Reality 1

Belle: Part 1 of 'Flawed Reality'.

Part 2: [link]
Part 3: [link]

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These 3 artworks started off with Alice. I cut an Alice stencil in 2010, and as it was just the outline.. I used the stencil like a colouring in book. I have always LOVED defacing photos in newspapers, doodling horns on people and drawing glasses etc..
So I did this with Alice. I turned her gangster, and I started to think.. Maybe this is what Alice would actually turn out like if in this day and age, she tripped on drugs, fell down a hole and experienced all of the trippy shit, I mean she was almost killed. Teens today seem to take on labels like "emo" "goth" and sometimes these stereotypes reflect how these kids feel or act as a way to express. Soo.. In my mind, Alice didn't cope with her experiences, sure it made her stronger, she got tats, joined some kind of mafia.. Etc. I just kept drawing more of this gangster look on her!
Then I thought, what if I moved on and did the same to my other favourite Disney characters. I am a big believer in Girl Power. Female singers, actresses, characters in films, books etc etc! They're just pretty inspiring.
So next, I did this with Belle. Who is my favourite Disney princess.. I don't know how the skull would REALLY fit into her life if she was around today (That could be explained here: [link]) but I thought it looked quite cool after I'd finished it. Then I had this idea to do some sort of big Disney themed artwork series.. I started with Belle first in January. The idea of creating a collage of graffiti/stencils for an urban background and then follow up with the Belle stencil, and then with watery acrylics I 'coloured' her in, so you could still see the collage underneath, and then I re-stencilled over the top to re-enforce the outline. This turned out so well in my eyes. I decided to do the same with Alice, and my portrayal of her. I did Alice quite some time after Belle.. So the technique differed, and I think somehow Belle's colours faded so she became quite pale and delicate looking over time.. Which kind of worked well.
I didn't really have another Disney princess that I truly liked, but I sort was drawn to Jasmine and I started to think of how I could make her.. More rebellious/real. She's Arabic from my research so I thought of how that is portrayed these days, you know, what we see on TV and how Arabic people are portrayed by people who really have no idea at all.. And then someone posted something on Tumblr of Disney princesses in real life, and it had a woman dressed as Jasmine holding a machine gun and grenades in a war torn country and I just thought THAT IS IT. I wanted her to carry a weapon, not in a discriminatory way or to poke fun at anyone but I thought it would show her not as a damsel in distress but a powerful in control woman, it's ALWAYS the prince saving the princess, surely Jasmine could take care of herself sometimes.. Then M.I.A. released her long awaited video for 'Bad Girls' and this seemed to just top off my inspiration completely. There are girls in the video where it is set in Morocco, and they're in their Muslim clothing but they had that kick-ass 'don't fuck with me' look, and that's what I wanted for Jasmine. So I did that, I made her background look very colourful and bright sort of to reflect that hot-desert-bright-clothing look. Which kind of clashed when it came to painting the gun which gets a bit lost in there!
So there it is, the flawed reality of what could have been of the totally ass kicking Disney ladies.