Author Archive: Imogen

Illustrating all 200 Grimms’ fairy tales

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.

Merchant of Venice Revision Cards

I didn’t know the Merchant of Venice well until I illustrated these GCSE Revision cards for@FlipsCoCards, but I ended up fascinated by this play (and revision card author Sarah Barker did a wonderful job of exploring its many weirdnesses). Also, it was a great text to illustrate: Venice, renaissance outfits, Jewish history, complex and ambiguous characters.

The first reference point was my sketches of Venice from 2015.The picture on the one of the cards has a very very tiny self-portrait of me sketching the view from the Doge’s palace.

Then I had a look at medieval maps of Venice, like this sixteenth century panorama or this tourist’s impression from  the wonderfully named Niccolò da Poggibonsi (1346).

I also played a game of trying to find suitable models for the characters in renaissance art, like these crowd scenes from Bellini.

Then I remembered I had the perfect book for this job – “clothes ancient and modern” by Cesare Vecellio (a cousin of Titian). This is an amazing book, which depicts costumes and customs from all around the renaissance world, from China to Mexico, including some remarkable hats!

Vecellio’s section on Venice is huge (since that’s where he’s from), and gave me lots of good ideas for the characters’ outfits.

Vecellio didn’t draw Venetian Jews, though he describes them wearing distinguishing yellow caps. But I did find this book which gives a more cheerful depiction of Jewish life in Venice than the play – I love the bread baking scene.

Of course, it wouldn’t be Merchant of Venice if it didn’t feature a pound of flesh. The author of the cards was kind enough to say of my picture “I think your dripping lump is phenomenal” – this is the nicest thing that anyone has ever said about my art!

You can get all the revision cards from here: https://flipscocards.com Why not collect the whole set?

Animal Farm revision cards

The latest set of flipsco GCSE English literature revision cards, with illustrations by me. You can buy them here along with many others.

Sadly the allegory of truth-twisting and injustice felt entirely relevant, but more happily, I was able to refine my still-imperfect horse drawing abilities.

Here are Boxer, Clover, and Molly (obviously a relation of My Little Pony, but without the hearts on her bum) – along with some of my million practice drawings. The internet did get pretty convinced that I was trying to buy a horse!

I’ve got better at getting the back legs of a horse facing in the right direction. In fact, I got so confident that my housemate (already an expert horse-drawer) and I decided to tackle the ultimate artistic challenge – a horse riding a bicycle (mine is the pen one, my housemate’s is the rather better pencil one).

I definitely find pigs less stressful to draw than horses – I love their little toes. The difficulty was trying to give them the right characters. Interestingly, Orwell specifies the breed for some of them (Old Major is a Middle White, Napoleon is the farm’s only Berkshire), so plenty of agricultural research was needed.

As well as farm animals, I researched Soviet propaganda posters – I found this site particularly useful: https://www.wallpaper.com/art/soviet-propaganda-graphic-design-wolfsonian. There’s some amazing graphic design on these. I particularly love the one of the workers defeating the dragon of global imperialism (the eighth one down), and I copied bits of them in my cover design, only with more pigs.