You can see the pictures here!
At the beginning of 2016, I bought a copy of Grimms’ fairy tales in German, with the intention of reading and illustrating them one by one. I can’t remember exactly why I decided to do this, but once I’d had the idea, it seemed fairly inevitable, combining all my favourite things: fairy tales, language learning, detailed drawings, and dogged completionism.
But then I realised that drawing a fairy tale a day would take for ever, given that I wanted them to be lavishly detailed, and so I never found time to get started on the project. In 2018, the Bodleian Library held an exhibition on Tolkien, including this map illustrated by Pauline Baynes (who also did the wonderful illustrations in the Narnia books), featuring small scenes in little circles: https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/news/2016/may-03. I decided to steal borrow this idea for an art project of my own – small roundlets would be less time-consuming that full-page illustrations. In early 2019, I was at a loose end, because some other art projects had fallen through, so I finally decided it was time to get started on the Grimms!
I decided to work in random order, since the more famous fairy tales are clustered towards the beginning and I didn’t want to use them all up at once. So I rolled a dice, and got the great story of a tailor who has to spend a night in a princess’s cellar with a ferocious bear. The tailor convinces the bear that it wants to learn the violin, giving him an excuse to trim its claws so that they won’t get in the way of the fiddling.
So as to make the project manageable, I made the circles tiny – 6 cm in diameter, and had a rule that I wasn’t going to do preliminary sketches, and that I was only allowed to do one “take” for each picture – that way they would just be quick little sketches, and so wouldn’t take up too much time and energy. This didn’t exactly turn out to be true! They took me ages and I wore through a lot of dip pen nibs! For example, this one where I had to fit in two brothers, ten companion animals, a princess, and a dead seven-headed dragon.
This one’s the only one that’s nearly life-size:
Some of the Grimms’ fairy tales are justifiably forgotten, but some really ought to be better known. Here are a few of my favourites:
Donkey Cabbages (cabbages that turn you into a donkey come in surprisingly useful):
The twelve huntsmen (learn all about why women hate peas!):
Fitcher’s bird (a version of Bluebeard, where the heroine has lots of agency – though I’d question her decision to dress as a giant bird):
The Masterthief (good heists!):
The Devil’s golden hairs (featuring the Devil’s redoubtable grandmother)
The ungrateful son (he gets a frog stuck on his face – for ever!):
The nixie in the millpond (the epic adventures of a young bride to defeat the nixie, who grabs people who come to close to the pond and drags them in):
Godfather Death (Death is godfather to a young doctor, but what if the doctor refuses to let Death have the patients who belong to him):
I finished the first 100 fairy tales in Summer 2019, then took a break and finished the other half in Spring 2020. Of course, this was also the time of increasing realisation about the urgency of the Climate Emergency, followed by the Coronavirus pandemic. So all in all, an excellent time to be able to retreat into the realm of fairy tales.
I hope I learnt things from this project. Artistically, I tried to get better at composition – how to include lots of detail in a tiny space, while still making the relevant parts clear to the viewer. From the fairy tales, I learnt that you should be kind to old beggarwomen, think laterally when solving riddles, keep going when you think all hope is lost, and do your best to be the youngest of three siblings.
