stages of blue.
inspired by pinocchio’s blue fairy.
"stages of blue."
faerie tale feet piece inspired by the blue fairy in carlo collodi's pinocchio.
carlo collodi’s “pinocchio” is a well-beloved tale, i suppose. but the book is shockingly more disturbing than the “pinocchio” disney movie that i grew up with. pinocchio is not a sympathetic character. you too repeatedly want to throw him in with the kindling. he’s just awful. and gullible. and ill-behaved. which makes me all the MORE grateful for the geniuses at the walt disney story department who brought this great tale to life (story pun!) in a memorable, and palatable, way. (there’s a rumor the character was inspired by one of colloid’s more obnoxious students… teachers, i sympathize with you, anyway.)
“be careful, pinocchio. these bad companions will, sooner or later, make you lose your love of books, and may even bring some misfortune upon you.”
~the good (blue) fairy
i’ll show you the process of painting this faerie tale feet piece, and then below share with you all the shapes hidden in the background from the original stories/book.
because we all know pinocchio as a marionette who was forced to perform with no strings for the puppet show, i wanted for the first time to create a 3-d shadowbox piece imitating the theatre stage. so here’s the beginnings of the proscenium with the blue fairy’s feet featured in the center.
here are 4 of the 5 layers to the original piece. the stage curtains and proscenium, the stage lights, the stage, and monstro and the waves trying to once again engulf the fleeing pinocchio, gepetto, cat, and goldfish.
once the layers were done, i needed to paint the background pattern. so this is how i transfer it- with my pattern drawing on a piece of tracing paper taped to my illustration board… and then pressing down with my ink-less hello kitty pen with transfer paper in-between to leave grey lines i can paint around.
because i use gouache as an opaque medium, i have to paint the background color in one sitting. thankfully i have a magnifying lamp that helps me see around all those tiny shapes as i paint around each icon for literally hours on end… so here are the first few minutes, beginning in the top left corner of my board!
here’s the background painted in and some of the shapes starting to be painted in as well…. one color at a time!
more colors are added one at a time across the board until the background is complete… paint paint paint.. patience paint and patience…
here’s zoomed out for a bit of scale. the orange square (background pattern painting) is 11″ square. and yes, i mix my paints on paper plates. (i save them and can re-use the colours for other paintings later!)
here’s a view of my tins full of gouache paint tubes and the pieces all painted and ready to be framed together in 3d…!
here’s a detail shot of the blue fairy flying over the background!
and here is the final pieces of the painting all framed together. it’s so beautiful in real life, i wish you were in my living room/studio to see it…!
included story iconography
so what’s hiding in the background from carlo collodi’s original tale?
here we go… (with a few bonus trivia facts thrown in for good measure.)
the talking/kicking stick of wood that gepetto carved into pinocchio the puppet (there’s a fight with his friend antonio about it when he calls gepetto “polenta,” the color of his hair that he’s teased for)
the talking cricket
^which pinocchio smashed with a mallet when he tried to give him good advice (the ghost cricket reappears in later chapters)
the puppet show manager, known as “Fire-Eater” who had a long black beard
the gold coins that the fox and cat convinced pinocchio to bury so a tree would grow with more coins on it- i painted italy on the gold coins and marked the town of “collodi” with a tiny dot- collodi was the village in tuscany where the author’s mother was from, not his real name.
feathers from the black bird eaten by the cat
the cat who pretended to be a blind beggar
the devious fox who repeatedly tricked pinocchio and lead him to do naughty things and even hung him at one point. and tried to get him eaten by a giant serpent… i tell ya, the book is just awful!
the snail with a lamp on his head at the blue fairy’s house that sloooooooooooowly took all night to come downstairs and let pinocchio out of the rain after he’d been chained up like a dog and bribed by the fox to steal the chickens (so complicated; and such a long story for such a short book; which was actually originally just published chapter by chapter in an italian children’s journal)
the dog-fish (in the disney movie, thankfully, it’s a giant whale. in the book, depending on the multiple english translations i read, monstro is a dog-fish or a shark… regardless, i don’t want to be swallowed by one, so i painted him as cutely as possible.)
a headband of donkey ears for Playtime Land (or Pleasure Island) where the boys are turned into donkey slaves and sold at auction.
the golden locket pinocchio sees on the blue fairy (who’s really a dead ghost girl with blue hair in the book) at the circus where he’s been performing tricks as a donkey.
i think that’s all i got in there!
i recommend the film over the book. but curiosity would well be quenched with this crazy piece of children’s literature.
original framed piece available for $575. contact me to collect this unique 3-d mixed-media piece! (image is 11x11” and framed in a soft black handmade wooden frame to 19” square.)
here are a few memorable blue fairy quotes from the original text:
“yes, i promised it. now all depends on you.”
“be careful, pinocchio. these bad companions will, sooner or later, make you lose your love of books, and may even bring some misfortune upon you.”
“boys are quick to make promises, but are sometimes slow about keeping them.”
“in this world, one must be courteous to all, if one would expect courtesy in the hour of need.”