Ariel (The Little Mermaid)

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So, finally, it’s her! If Hinagiku is important to me in the present, Ariel has a deeper weight in my past, because she was my childhood crush. Naturally, I had to create a model of her.

Ariel is the protagonist of the animated movie The Little Mermaid, the fourth Disney princess, daughter of King Triton and the youngest among several sisters. Curiously, all of them look pretty generic, except for her—but to be fair, they only appear in two quick scenes, so the animation team wouldn’t really waste time giving them elaborate designs. Adventurous and full of dreams, Ariel wants to leave the merpeople world, gain legs, and explore the human realm she finds so fascinating (how naïve… so many human girls wishing they could be mermaids).

Her movie eventually got a sequel, and Ariel—alongside Simba—is one of the rare Disney characters who actually has a child who takes the spotlight in the second film. Her daughter, Melody, of course, can’t compete with her mother’s beauty; she looks more like a genderbend of Eric, honestly. There’s also a lesser-known prequel where Ariel stars again, showing what happened to her mother (who basically looks like an Ariel clone; at this point I’m convinced all the sisters were adopted…).

Ariel has shown up in several video games, especially the Kingdom Hearts series, where her role as a princess was oddly reassigned to Alice (Apparently the devs realized they hadn’t justified giving Ariel legs, so they handed the princess role to Alice instead—even though Alice isn’t officially a Disney princess). She’s also made cameos in shows like House of Mouse and Sofia the First, and her most recent appearance was a Lego crossover with the other princesses. Yes, that’s her latest one. Live...what? I don’t know what you’re talking about. That doesn’t exist. You must be imagining things—next you’ll tell me there’s a movie called Dragon Ball Evolution.

Anyway, this model was trained with a dataset of 1000 images, using various promotional artworks, but most of them are from screenshots of the movie, no fanart was used. So you’ll find her as a mermaid, in pajamas, in a casual blue dress, in a pink dress, as a bride… The only thing missing is her appearance as a mother in the sequel, since all the screenshots came from the first movie. Probably because of the heavy use of Disney promotional pieces, the final result surprisingly doesn’t mimic the 80s movie’s colors or style. Unlike other models I’ve shown, this one isn’t tightly bound to the original style. The colors and linework are bolder and more vibrant, except for the wedding dress, which—oddly enough—ends up closer to the movie’s look, likely because there was less promotional art available for that outfit.

Still, it’s a very complete model, at least regarding Ariel’s younger phase. Hope you enjoy it.