As we reach the home stretch of this thing the magic Tupperware gave me one that I may have been looking forward to on a subconscious level, Hans My Hedgehog.!
For this one, I didn’t really bother with what part of the story I wanted to do for this picture. After all, it’s all about Hans. He’s a hedgehog who rides a rooster and plays the bagpipes! What more do you need? (though in hindsight I might have borrowed a little bit more from memories of Maurice Sendak’s illustration than I think I did.)
Having actually read the story, it’s almost a shame that the second half of it is a by the numbers Beauty and the Beast story. Hans is such a cool character you almost wish the princess turned into a hedgehog and they rode away to Hans’s woodland kingdom to live happily ever after.
Well, today The Magic Tupperware told me to draw Little Briar Rose AKA the Grimm version of Sleeping Beauty(okay I confess, first it told me to do the The Nixie in the Pond and then theThe Spirit in the Glass Bottle… it’s the end of the challenge, I just want to get through with it with no more hassle)
So when I got to doing Sleeping Beauty two things hit me. First, with the Film Noir thing I’d been mostly trying to do throughout this challenge gave it a serious and exploitable Indiana Jones vibe. Second, I found myself wondering why Briar Rose would be sleeping in a bed when the Prince found her. She fell asleep in front of a spinning wheel. Everybody else in the castle fell asleep when she did. The only one who’d be able to move her was the wicked fairy (or the thirteenth wise woman in this case)And she certainly wouldn’t be willing.
This was another one time during this challenge where I kind of cheated drawing a story, Dr. Know-All, I don’t know why I put in the tupperware, to begin with. So I drew a second time and got Rumplestiltskin.
Unfortunately, while this was an easy one to conceive I ended up getting terribly behind schedule because of looking for a reference for spinning wheels. I frequently use Google Sketchup as a source of models for drawing references, however, when I tried to download a spinning wheel Sketchup developed a bit of a personality regarding new terms of use. There was no active link to click and I wasted way too much time trying to solve this problem.
I think I finally came up with something decent freehand. Other than overthinking what the whole turning straw into gold thing looked like, it went pretty well.
Got the third Hans Christian Andersen Story in a row today with Thumbelina!
Since most of Thumbelina is a “Pearls of Pauline” style travelogue, this was another story with lots of options to work with. I was really tempted to do the scene with her and the Mole but I wasn’t sure anyone who only had the basic knowledge of the story would know what it was all about. So I went with the beginning of the story with Thumbelina appearing in the flower.
Maybe it’s just me having read way too much manga lately, but looking at this picture after I finished it, I’m seeing an unintentional Attack on Titan vibe. Don’t worry the nice old lady isn’t going to eat Thumbelina.
This weekI decided to go for some comfort viewing with one of my favorite subgeneras of science fiction, cyberpunk. Regrettably due to the rules of my dipping into Scarecrow’s collection, most of the examples of the genre on film (english language anyway) I’ve seen… as well as many of the mediocre ones. So this week I found myself watching what was left.
I confess that this description was a little unfair since the first film on my list, Strange Days was actually pretty good. It’s December 31st 1999 and the millennium is upon us and the city of Las Angeles is a burning pit of civil unrest. Ex-cop and black marketer Lenny Nero, (Ralph Finnes),is spending it hustling, d buying and selling memories. That is to say complete immersion recordings of first person memories. Apparently they’re illegal.. Nero is a pathetic human being barely making ends meet an only respected by his two remaining friends, bodyguard and limousine driver Lornette “Mace” Mason (Angela Bassett) and private investigator Max Peltier (Tom Sizemore).When he finds a recording of a murder left in his car he finds himself in the middle of a conspiracy… Or is he?
I enjoyed this movie, My only problem with it was the problem I had with Inception. Where the near future setting is virtually identical to the present except for one piece of magical technology that should be reveioutionalry with tons of different applications but instead in little more than illegal contraband…. But Angela Basset kicked ass, literally and figuratively, so all is good.
The next film in my list Cherry 2000 takes place in what appears to be a post apocalyptic future. Most of the world are anarchic wastelands, everything is being recycled, and sexual encounters require complex contracts… because of the last one sex droids are popular. When a young business man breaks his vintage Cherry 2000 he has to go out into the wasteland with the help of a beautiful tracker to find another one. Will he survive long enough to get a replacement? Or will he discover the love of a real girl?
I don’t think I’m exaggerating much when I say this is one of the worst films I’ve seen in a long while. There were a few times where they might have been trying to be satirical, for example the villains being caricature of california yuppies, but just couldn’t pull it off. That’s probably the best thing I can say about it.
It looks like I drew a Hans Christien Andersen story twice in a row for two days. So for today, I got what is probably his best-known story, The Little Mermaid. This is another tough one. The first rule is to ignore the Disney version. For me this is easy. It’s not that I dislike the Disney version (I watched it three times the first week it came out.) It’s just so different that, other than her species, dear sweet little Ariel has absolutely nothing to do with Andersen’s tragic heroine.
Sources that are harder for me to ignore are the illustrations of Kay Nielsen and an obscure Ranken-Bass film called the Daydreamer. It’s mostly silly but the animated Andersen stories are done completely straight. Because of this hearing Burl Ives as the sea king telling his daughters, in a whispery deadpan, how humans are mortal and will die… but unlike immortal mermaids, they have souls, sticks in my mind.
Ultimately, I think I was mostly inspired by the statue in Copenhagen harbor. I decided to ignore most of the story and present the little Mermaid with her back to us, alone dreaming of something she can never be part of.
As we reach the home stretch of this thing the magic Tupperware gave me one that I may have been looking forward to on a subconscious level, Hans My Hedgehog.!
