Smurfs (2025)- Smurfette

 Hello! Testing...1, 2, 3...Is anyone here?? Time to dust off this blog to share work that I've done for the Smurfs 2025 movie! This might be a few posts and somewhat lengthy, but bare with me!

- Smurfette -

Growing up watching the Smurfs in Spanish, “Los Pitufos”, on a Saturday morning, never did I imagine to be working on such a legacy show as an adult. Being able to play with so many beloved characters was such a core memory that it’ll never forget.

I was brought early on before prepro to help visualize what our girl Smurfette would look like for this film. At the time, we were exploring a variety of different styles- so many to even count- and before I knew who our star would be, I was taking guesses to see who would play her.

In the end, Rihanna loved the classic legacy look of Smurfette with a few magic touches that we’ve added to freshen her up. We also wanted to honor Peyo, the creator, by keeping many elements of her style and appeal while adding a few modern twists here and there. 

A lot of the shape language that was built into the smurfs, was including Peyo's signature brush strokes in his comic book style. That was an important element we wanted to bring into all of their designs.

To help our other designers down the pipeline, we created guides to show the specificity of each stroke- down to the tapering of the tip!

We also had to make sure that every angle, she looked appealing as she did in her Peyo comic book style. You'd imagine it would be such a simple task, but in reality there were so many layers to her hair construction- that it required a lot of visualization to make it happen!

Because this was a hybrid show, we had to think about how her hair worked in movement and how each layer of her hair would animate. My favorite was calling them lasagna slices to describe each layer, haha.

So much went into her hair construction and function that, it’s where I spent the majority of my efforts on. Translating an original 2D hair design had its challenges, and lots of tricks were used to make her classic hairstyle remain the same in a 3D world for every angle you see her in. It was definitely a team effort between Paulette & Tristan and I to make her come to life!

The team at Cinesite also did such an amazing job at translating our work into her final look!

When we were working on her dress, we explored various different styles, including going more avant garde. We looked at the era in which Peyo was created and tried to hone in on the 60's era with the simple shapes with fun patterns.

We looked into a lot of organic shapes that are within the Smurf world to help shape her dress. The shape of her dress ended up being inspired by the way mushrooms look on the bottom, by making a fun balloon-shaped bubble and realized this was the way to go for her outfit. Figuring out how it mechanically worked, was also a challenge, but since this film was a hybrid in terms of style, anything could happen!

Before we landed on her final hair, I must have designed over 100 hairstyles & colors! We tried to look at all the hairstyles Rihanna has done over the years to see if we could somehow incorporate it into our modern day Smurfette. But as I mentioned earlier, we ended up mostly honoring her classic look to make our viewers appreciate the classic Peyo style.

We tried to incorporate Peyo's signature squiggle throughout her hair and we found it was challenging in so many ways because it would have to be adjusted for every angle. 

There are a lot of animation tricks done, by the talented team at Cinesite, that were done to help make her design possible ;)

For a very close second, she almost had a cute little side pony tail that I thought was super fun and fresh for her! But we realized making it appealing on every angle would be a big challenge and decided on her fluffy hairstyle instead :)

There is more to share, but for now I'll leave you this small insight of what it took to make our modern day Smurfette. I hope you enjoyed as much as I did!

Now go watch the movie and tell your friends and family and see if you can spot my name in the credits :) 

More on my website *soon* at gabbyzapata.com/paramount-animation

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 Hello blog! 

I haven't forgotten you! Life has been a little busy and finally have a little bit of time to share one of my newest posts more in detail here. 

I've always wanted to draw a saree dress and play with patterns more.

For this one, it first started as a pencil sketch and then I scanned it. 

From there, I needed to do more hand painted patterns because I didn't have the colors I needed. I'm slowly but surely building a library of painted swatches and they're truly so fun to make! I used watercolor paper but used Holbein acrylic gouache.

Here are some more detail shots! 

Here's some bonus doodles I've drawn that I haven't shared on insta :) 

Feel free to add a comment below :) Til next time! 

 Patterns, patterns, patterns.

On today's post is all about patterns! I had sketched out this doodle on procreate and at first, didn't think much of it. Usually I draw various doodles and sometimes one makes it to "final" stage. 

In this case, she first started out as a line art and then I colored her roughly. 

But I wasn't feeling it. So what do we do when we're not feeling it??

We give up! 

Nah, I'm just kidding. You look at it from a different angle. 

Sometimes drawings or ideas don't work out and that's ok too! Sometimes I abandon drawings and come back to them later. But in this case, I thought about coloring her by using my painted swatches from a while back and create a collage with it. 

A few months ago, I painted a bunch of small pattern swatches using acryla gouache on cold press paper. Then I scanned and started to digitally assemble while using the line art as a guide.

To create the feel of it being traditionally cut, I did lasso tool but imperfect to create the cut effect. 

Straight out of the box, no scan manipulation, this is the final of the painted collage pieces. No filters or effects. While I'm happy now this turned out, I played around a little bit by adding some color effects to manipulate the entire piece. 

One with a golden tone, other with a more magenta color. I don't have a favorite, but I gravitate towards the original scan unedited version the best. Because if this was cut IRL, there wouldn't be an easy way to create those colors unless you plan out ahead of time. But since I didn't, I worked with what I have. Kind of like a fun puzzle you see come to life. So you can see the true colors into a simple collage. And that's all for todays post! Hope you enjoy! Feel free to leave a comment on other things you might enjoy seeing on there! :)

 Que le doy? Que le sirvo? 
Unas papitas y unas tortillas porfis.
This is what went through my mind as I worked on this piece.

Whenever I feel stuck on what to draw, I think back of old memories or experiences and then many times that works out to inspire a new piece. For this one, I wanted to capture a childhood memory of visiting the local mercados in Mexico. 

If you've ever been in one, you know it's a treasure chest full of surprises. 

From the señora that sells candy, to Don Juan selling quesos, to the viejita selling her handmade piñatas. There's so many different kinds of stands. 

Like anything, to be authentic, I look for reference of mercados in Mexico. I love to make a mood board for inspiration. Some where I've visited, and then the others are from the biggest market in Mexico City known as La Central de Abastos! I always would end up leaving with a big jugo de naranja and zanahoria. The BEST. Also, they're like a few pesos. If it was here in the US, It would've costed me like $20 bucks haha. 

From there, I doodles some quick sketches just to get a feel of what I want to do. 

They're not pretty, but doodling fast helps me think quicker and add ideas as I see from my mood board. You can see they all have different ways they layout their products to their best display. Some use woven baskets, crates, flour sacks, display cases, etc. The list goes on! There's always a pulley cart laying around as well as a mop and a cubetita. So you know I had to add that in there! I also love their sticker price labels. Sometimes they're ornate with fancy lettering or with simple sharpie.

Anyways! Enjoy this Timelapse from Procreate below and see how many times I got distracted and draw off subject haha :)

 He dicho, CASO CERRADO!

I hear this show on a daily while i'm in my office working as my Mom watches TV on the other room. This latina grew up on this tv show and it's amazing to see it's still airing til this day. Granted, they're all re-runs but I've seen to see any repeats for the past couple years that I've had my Mom be with me. Anyway let's get to it!

If you're familiar with the show, you KNOW there's interesting characters from time to time. And this was the one time. I usually sit on the couch with my Mom at the end of the day and doodle while she watches tv. Usually it's Caso Cerrado haha.

I actually took a quick photo on tv of her back in a December episode but it was't til the other night I remembered I took the photo and decided to revisit it.

At first it started out with a few quick poses from her on Procreate. I wish I could remember what she was claiming but nonetheless, she was sucha character! 

From there, I sit there and doodle some of the other people from time to time. I highly recommend watching the show even if you don't know what they're saying. Or just crazy shows like this in general. Lots of interesting people to see!

Fun fact, many moons ago, back when I was studying at Ringling for college in Florida, we once met Dra. Polo in Orlando for some local event! My grandma, one of her last wishes was to meet her. So there we go trying to find her. It was sucha fun day. You can see my mom grabbing her hand in that one photo and me doing sucha terrible camera job LOL. The one on the left was her reaching for my Grandma, then my mom PULLING her hand in LOL (embarrassing haha) and then her Peace-ing out haha.

And lastly, this SUPER quick scribble of her. (I was very sleepy and had the ipad angled so low I had no idea how this was going to turn out). I'm pretty sure if she saw this, she'd kick me out haha.

Bonus doodle: 

In Universo (Owned by Telemundo) they play Caso Cerrado, Storage Wars (in spanish) and so sometimes we end up watching that because there's nothing else. So here's just a couple doodles from the bidders of the show:

Also doodled in a very sleepy-state of mind. 

 Mexico isn't Mexico if there aren't cables running all over the place. And yes, many other countries also have this too I'm sure! With that, an illustration based on a photo I took on the way to somewhere back in 2019

I wanted to capture the lighting and other typical features from this colonia in Roma Sur. The houses are very different than other colonias in the city. There's ornate window treatments, detailed arches etc. 

While I may have opted out of adding the typical tinacos or perritos on the roof tops, I've added them before for these other house explorations I've done before in other neighborhoods. 

Different neighborhoods have different types of structure. I'm more familiar with the houses in sector popular. When I used to visit grandparents house many years ago in Colima, you would hear all the neighborhood kids running with the clacking chanclas while holding a bag of papitas ready to play canicas or make paper boats and race them down the street stream after a rainy day.

I loved going to the rooftops and check out the city. It wasn't very uncommon to do that because the water tanks would always have to be checked. 

Also the dogs over there are built different than the US. They roam around everywhere! So you know I had to draw them in there too. 

Here's some personal photos throughout the years of quick pics I've taken from Mexico City & Guadalajara that helped inspire the above :)

That's something I wish I'd see more here. More colors! Specifically brightly colored houses. If we have these colors that exist, we might as well use them! Out with the clean white aesthetic colors and in with the fun bright colors :)!