Tales from the Brothers Grimm: The Wolf and the Seven Kids

I don't want to share too many images from my personal project translating and illustrating some of the stories by the Brothers Grimm, but here is another image I'm particularly fond of, which I finished this past weekend. This picture comes from "The Wolf and the Seven Kids", a predator-prey story with clear echoes of "Little Red Riding Hood" and "The Three Little Pigs" in which good eventually triumphs over evil.

The wolf breaks in

I drew the image traditionally and coloured it in Photoshop. The shadow effect, I feel, works particularly well and adds a sense of menace and drama; having seen it without the shadow, it loses some of its impact.

Happy Saint George's Day

Some of the characters gracing the British political scene at the moment (and the folk whom they fool) drove me to this...proud to be English but proud to be open-minded! :)

Throwback Thursday: A Midsummer Night's Dream

Originally posted here, this is something I created this time last year. A Midsummer Night's Dream was the first Shakespeare play I was introduced to. I came to know it through a series called Shakespeare: The Animated Tales - an anthology series of abridged versions of some of the most famous Shakespeare plays, each animated in a different technique. This was a co-production with the great Russian animation house Soyuzmultfilm, renowned for their use of different animation techniques under one building). I saw the adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream from the series as a seven year-old after my grandmother borrowed the VHS from the library. What has always stood out to me, both as a child and as an adult, are the fantastic scenes and the enchanted yet somewhat sinister imagery. Indeed, the fairies here aren't the flittering female creatures from a Victorian fairy story but the elves and goblins of old English folklore - dubious nature spirits of pagan origin feared by a superstitious population. Of course, as a child, I wasn't able to completely get the sexual undertones of the play (only the romantic ones); I suppose this picture was my way of visualising the sensual themes.