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15 Disney Princesses Reimagined By Amazing Artists

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Fifteen Disney heroines get pulled out of their fairy tales and dropped into completely different lives.

TheThings’ celebrity channel spent the last week of May 2017 combing through the corners of the internet where illustrators quietly rebuild pop culture icons from scratch, and the result is a 15-deep rundown of Disney princesses redrawn as new mothers, college freshmen, steampunk adventurers and plus-size heroines. None of it is official Disney art — every image comes from an independent digital creator working outside the studio system, which is exactly why the takes are so different from what’s on the poster.

The video’s throughline is simple: take a character everyone already knows down to the hem of her dress, then strip away the fairy-tale setting entirely. Ariel gets a British illustrator’s steampunk treatment. Elsa gets rendered like a photoreal portrait subject. Others get aged into parenthood, dropped into a dorm room, or redesigned around body types Disney’s animation studio never put on screen.

• The compilation runs 15 distinct reimaginings, spanning princesses from Snow White and Ariel to Elsa and Anna.
• British illustrator and painter Hilary J. Ruston is singled out for her stylized, steampunk-inflected version of Ariel, blending realism with a mythology-and-fairytale sensibility she’s known for across her portfolio.
• The redesign concepts cluster around a handful of recurring ideas: princesses as modern moms with infants and toddlers, as college students and trendy teenagers, as steampunk adventurers, and as body-positive, plus-size versions of themselves.

Fan Artists Favor Select Characters

Disney princesses work as source material precisely because the silhouette is already locked into everyone’s memory — Ariel’s fin, Belle’s yellow gown, Elsa’s braid. That familiarity is what makes a redesign land instantly; an artist only has to change one or two variables for the transformation to register. It’s the same instinct that’s kept this strain of fan art circulating for years across Tumblr, DeviantArt and Instagram, well before TheThings packaged 15 of the best examples into one rundown.

Jirka Vinse Jonatan Väätäinen’s Snow White leans into a more mature, almost photographic register, with piercing blue eyes replacing the character’s usual doe-eyed simplicity. Sakimi Chan’s Aurora goes the opposite direction, rendering Sleeping Beauty with an anime-inspired dynamism that makes her look younger and more kinetic than the 1959 original. Jeffrey Thomas takes Jasmine furthest from the source, giving her a punk-inspired edge that has nothing to do with Agrabah.

The Ariel Redesign That Anchors the List

The video’s marquee entry belongs to Hilary J. Ruston, whose work sits at the intersection of mythology, fairy tale and pop culture — territory that makes her a natural fit for a mermaid princess redesign. Her version of Ariel swaps the standard under-the-sea palette for a steampunk aesthetic, layering gears-and-brass detailing into a character whose entire visual identity has always been built around water and scales.

Her version of Ariel is a stunning blend of realism and whimsy, with a steampunk aesthetic that makes the mermaid princess look even more unique.

That’s the pattern across nearly every artist in the video: keep one recognizable anchor — Ariel’s red hair, Belle’s book, Merida’s bow — and rebuild everything around it. Claire Hummel’s Belle stays closest to the animated template, adding a layer of realism without abandoning the original costume design, while Ralph Sevelius pushes Merida into bolder, more saturated territory that emphasizes her adventurous streak over her royal one.

Grown-Up Princesses, Plus-Size Princesses, Everyday Princesses

The moms-and-babies concept is where the video gets its most emotional mileage, showing princesses in a life stage Disney’s films never depict — feeding, holding and raising children rather than being rescued or crowned. The plus-size redesigns push in a similar direction, reworking body types the studio’s animation has historically avoided, while the college-student and teenager takes drop the characters into dorm rooms and hallway lockers instead of castles.

Helen Chen’s Tiana, informed by her own studio background working on Wreck-It Ralph and Moana, leans elegant and soft-colored rather than reinventing the character wholesale. Alyssa Wong’s Mulan goes the opposite way, channeling an anime-and-manga influence into a fiercer, more warrior-posed figure than the 1998 film ever allowed. It’s the same character, two completely different emotional registers — which is the entire appeal of watching 15 artists tackle 15 princesses back to back.

Fans looking for more of this kind of pop-culture reinterpretation content tend to bounce between animation deep dives and music-driven Disney content, including tracks like Diane Guerrero and Stephanie Beatriz’s “What Else Can I Do?” from Encanto, which shows the studio’s own artists experimenting with tone in ways not far removed from what independent illustrators do with the classic princess lineup. It’s a similar impulse to the kind of viral breakdown content InfoSearched has covered around celebrity doppelgängers who look freakishly alike — audiences love spotting how far a familiar face can be pushed before it stops looking like itself.

The compilation closes on its biggest outlier: Kerry Callen’s take on Moira, the buccaneer heroine from Atlantis: The Lost Empire, a film Disney has never marketed under the official princess banner. It’s the tell that fan artists don’t actually care about the studio’s approved lineup — if a character has the right silhouette and a cult following, she’s getting the redesign treatment right alongside Ariel and Elsa.