Fairy tales are weird - The Butterfly

I'm sure that most people have heard a fairy tale or two by Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm via books, movies, the internet, or even now in television. Perhaps not the obscure ones, but they know the basic outline that many of the stories tell. Or so they think. 

Yes, it's more than likely that you've heard that The Little Mermaid doesn't end QUITE as well in the original story as it did in the Disney film. I won't ruin it for you, but she doesn't get her happily ever after. Wait... that may have ruined it for you. Oh well. However, a lot of fairy tales are just hot, hot messes. Which were told to children. Which is why I love them. 

There are the ones where horses drag girls in nail-studded barrels to their death (The Goose Girl, Grimm) or the ones that turn evil sisters into dogs which then need to be beaten every night with a stick on pain of death by a giant serpent lady (The Eldest Sister's Tale, Arabian Nights). I chose a slightly tamer one in Hans Christian Andersen's 'The Butterfly'. The gist of the story is that a butterfly has decided to take a wife, and he thinks that she should be an attractive flower. He first asks the daisy, but she rebuffs him because he calls her woman instead of a girl (YUP); he then tries some others who don't want him, until in the autumn he desperately asks the mint. She tells him that it'll never work because they're both too old - they should just be friends. He flies into a human house for the winter, gets caught and pinned, and the house plants laugh at him telling him that that's basically like marriage anyway. 

So yeah, good talk kids.

The Butterfly

 Colored Pencil, 15"x 10"

Colored Pencil, 10"x 15"

These are pieces that I did for my portfolio class at SVA. 'The Butterfly and the Daisy' was chosen to be in the SVA publication Illustration Portfolio no. 32. Whenever that comes out. SVA is the worst at getting back to people or letting them know when things are happening. They apparently just recently posted the graduation pictures from May. A lot of good that does me six months later when, at the time, I wanted to send/show some closeups of me walking across the stage to my relatives that couldn't be there. Win SVA. Win.