snow falls.
inspired by snow white & the seven dwarfs.
"snow falls."
faerie tale feet piece inspired by the brothers grimms' "snow white and the seven dwarfs."
i’ve taken all the enticing elements to retell the tale in icon form.
the original is different (well, more brutal, as the grimms were) than walt disney’s genius telling. she is driven away from the castle at the young, innocent, yet beautiful age of seven. and we imagine she ages while in the glass coffin awaiting the rescue by her prince & his men.
(p.s. the huntsman brings back either a boar’s or a deer’s heart for the queen, based on the translation you read. she salts it & eats it, thinking she has absorbed snow’s beauty & captured her essence. EW!!)
once at the dwarfs’ home, snow is first choked with ribbons from the peddler woman, then fell by a poisoned comb in her hair, and the third disguised visit brings the poisoned apple (half not poisoned that the queen eats to prove it’s not poisoned; tricky tricky!) from the envious, jealous, ruthless queen. the dwarfs take turns guarding the glass coffin in which they’ve placed the lovely snow white. and the coffin is visited by an owl, raven, and dove. (my favorite bits of the painting. up near the branch there.)
it is the prince’s men who stumble carrying the glass coffin away to the prince’s kingdom who dislodge the bit of poison apple from snow white’s throat. not a magic true*love’s kiss that awakens the maiden. but i’m sure they got around to that…. ; )
i won’t spoil the crazy ending, i do hope you’ll go read the tale for yourself, but let’s just say i didn’t paint the iron shoes here…. drama!
have a look at the painting process below!
sometimes your family members are nice enough to pose for your reference purposes. ;) thanks for playing passed-out, mags!!
once i narrowed down which story icons to use in the background, i created my pattern and re-traced it (with transfer paper in between) to transfer blue lines down to my illustration board.
once the drawing and pattern are transferred to the board, i first paint in the background colour around each and every story icon in the background.
each story icon gets a new custom-mixed gouache colour. and i knew i wanted yellow in the background and wanted to keep this piece to a warm fall-ish colour scheme. lots of browns and reds indicative of the woods.
detail of the finished background painting with the owl, raven, and dove in the tree snow white slept while unconscious.
the original gouache painting is 11 x 11" framed in soft black handmade wood frame to 19” square. available for collecting, $450 (+$40 for safe US shipping) contact me !