Fairy Tales
Dec. 17th, 2008 10:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerOne of my friends writes poetry and occasionally, bubbling with enthusiasm, emails it to us, so for Christmas I illustrated a few of her poems. Today I got them bound at Kinko's, which means the project is complete in good time - happiness!
I think the leaf picture turned out the best, artistically speaking (it’s hard to go wrong with leaves), but I had the most fun drawing the Fenghuang, a mythical Chinese bird. The drawing probably resembles a Fenghuang like an ibex resembles a unicorn, but that's all right, it has spiky fiery feathers and an enormous tail and a neck like a snake, which is surely enough for any mythical bird.
Does topics ever converge on anyone else? This week has been riddled with fairy tales: Fenghuangs, The Last Unicorn, discussions of a Disney movie marathon, my discovery of this unbelievably awesome webcomic, which is like a fractured fairy tale except brilliant, and also as long as the earth is round and totally addictive so don’t start reading if you need to get up in the morning or anything.
I thought I’d gotten over fractured fairy tales, after Ella Enchanted and Gail Carson Levine’s other (worse) retellings, and Shrek and Once Upon a Marigold, and this terrifying book called Zel by Donna Jo Napoli, and—but apparently the yen was just dormant.
Oddly enough, I never read many real fairy tales. They were distinctly out of fashion during the nineties, and also housed somewhere in the bowels of the nonfiction section—why? Given that they have fairies and ogres and dragons, how are fairy tales nonfiction?
But even if they had been available I would have avoided them. I read a more or less original version of Bluebeard when I was about seven, which apparently imprinted itself on my eyelids because I can still remember Bluebeard’s wife standing on top of the tower, waiting desperately for her brothers to rescue her, and Bluebeard’s below sharpening his ax and she’s got the bloody key to the horrible room with the severed bleeding heads...
I always think of that story when people complain about adulterated fairy tales, the ones that excise the bits where the bad guys have their feet danced off or their eyes pecked out. I’m not sure why saving little kids from the mental scarring is a problem.
I think the leaf picture turned out the best, artistically speaking (it’s hard to go wrong with leaves), but I had the most fun drawing the Fenghuang, a mythical Chinese bird. The drawing probably resembles a Fenghuang like an ibex resembles a unicorn, but that's all right, it has spiky fiery feathers and an enormous tail and a neck like a snake, which is surely enough for any mythical bird.
Does topics ever converge on anyone else? This week has been riddled with fairy tales: Fenghuangs, The Last Unicorn, discussions of a Disney movie marathon, my discovery of this unbelievably awesome webcomic, which is like a fractured fairy tale except brilliant, and also as long as the earth is round and totally addictive so don’t start reading if you need to get up in the morning or anything.
I thought I’d gotten over fractured fairy tales, after Ella Enchanted and Gail Carson Levine’s other (worse) retellings, and Shrek and Once Upon a Marigold, and this terrifying book called Zel by Donna Jo Napoli, and—but apparently the yen was just dormant.
Oddly enough, I never read many real fairy tales. They were distinctly out of fashion during the nineties, and also housed somewhere in the bowels of the nonfiction section—why? Given that they have fairies and ogres and dragons, how are fairy tales nonfiction?
But even if they had been available I would have avoided them. I read a more or less original version of Bluebeard when I was about seven, which apparently imprinted itself on my eyelids because I can still remember Bluebeard’s wife standing on top of the tower, waiting desperately for her brothers to rescue her, and Bluebeard’s below sharpening his ax and she’s got the bloody key to the horrible room with the severed bleeding heads...
I always think of that story when people complain about adulterated fairy tales, the ones that excise the bits where the bad guys have their feet danced off or their eyes pecked out. I’m not sure why saving little kids from the mental scarring is a problem.
