Rhapsodies

Today’s fairy tale Hans Christian Andersen’s Steadfast Tin Soldier, (it’s usually called the Brave Tin Soldier but frankly I like steadfast better) was another one that I really didn’t want to do. Regrettably, that’s the whole point of this exercise. I need a better excuse than “I don’t like this story” isn’t a good enough excuse. It has to be something like “I can’t find an English-language version of this”, as in getting The Grimm Brothers’ the Raven yesterday, or when I was doing my Nursery Rhyme challenge last year, “This is a saying about predicting whether from the colors of the sky. There’s nothing I can do with it in this monochrome medium”. So, Yeah… I had to draw The Steadfast Tin Soldier.

Because I didn’t like the story, I never did more than scan the original and only knew the cliff notes version of it. In fact, most of what I knew about it came from the Fantasia version of it (which I also considered one of the weakest of the entire collection.) So I admit I didn’t know the fine points. For example, for some reason, I had it in my head that the climactic scene of the story, which I’m using for this sketch, was a house fire. After quickly reading it I found it was some kids throwing the toys in the stove.

Finally, this was a strain to my 40ish aesthetic. Most of the toy soldiers boys would be playing with at the time would still look like soldiers from the Napoleonic war. So this scene would be deliberately anachronistic. Even more frustrating when I did a quick Pinterest search for pictures of toy soldiers, all I got were detailed models soldiers from world war one and two made by and for history buffs and wargamers, and illustrations of this story. (and I couldn’t look at those because that would be cheating.)

All in all, I guess it came out okay… I think I botched the ballerina. Though I can use the excuse that she’s a paper doll and I can claim she was badly drawn.

Two-thirds into this and I’m back with Hans Christian Andersen with one of the best examples of the grateful dead motif (no, not that Grateful dead) The Traveling Companion.

The Traveling Companion is one of my favorite Andersen stories but it’s also one of the more frustrating ones since once again there’s not much about it that really stands out. Sure, there’s some really cool scene’s in it, my favorite being the one where he chases the witch in flight using borrowed wings, but there really any images that I could show you and you would say, “Hey. That’s from the Traveling Companion, isn’t it?”

So pretty much that leaves me with our hero, John, meeting the traveling companion. Not much about it to write home about, but it brings the general theme across. I think it’s important to capture the look of the companion. I always see him as tall and dignified, sort of a cross between Max Von Sydow and Ian McKellen.