Welcome back,

After sheer endless weeks the time has come to get the chapter for the Snow White piece done and finally lay this case to rest.

It may be a tad less elaborate than other descriptions which is caused by my lack of satisfaction with this illustration as well as the problems that already trashed two other drafts for this chapter. Alas, it shall be informative nonetheless.
So, a while back I started my fairytail pictures with Allerleirauh/All-Kinds-of-Fur and decided to do more pieces on other fairytails. As with All-Kinds-of-Fur, Snow White took me several tries to get to a result I would post at all. The sketches were all about depicting her with her story's villain, the Evil Queen. As the probably most iconic Snow White action is, well, dying, just to be returned to life by the dwarves shortly after, I wanted to go all drama and select one of the canonical three attempts of murder. To give the Evil Queen a closer connection to her (step)daughter, I chose the most hands-on, the strangling with the necklace. I knew that I wanted to depict the exact moment Snow White's body would go limp and slip from the Evil Queen's grip to the floor (only to rise once more, when the dwarves come home). It's a strong moment, I think, when the Evil Queen gets over the fail of her first attempt and is sure - again - that the girl would never again threaten her position as beauty queen, just for us to know that it would take even one more evil plan to send Snow White into her famous glass coffin. Also, the aesthetic of tension and relaxation was luring me into the delicate job to find just the right angles to capture that exact moment and really convey it visually. Let's just say that I think it's much safer to explain it to you than trust the illustration alone.

The costume designs are taken from the time of the story's origin, the 16th Century. I researched royal and noble attires from oil paintings and the like to give both of them an aura of credibility as queen and princess. With Snow White, it was relatively easy to keep a very familiar colour palette. For the Evil Queen, not so much. I love her character design in the Disney movie, but it didn't fit the shapes and colours I found. So I went for a subdued, but more 'accurate' version, with cold colours and a night-black crown shape that mirrors Snow White's falling hair in an inverted fashion. I know, it could have been a moment for the costumed queen, clothed in a dark cape or something like that, but I took it more abstractly and let both of them be in their full glory.

Contrary, for the background I decided on an ominous wilderness with menacing trees and greyish colours that lead into a faraway hidden horizon. The only elements I allowed were the foreshadowing apple and the white lily, quite the heavy-duty symbol, but effective, I think. I'm not at all satisfied with the background and it's lacking depth. It should be far darker and, in turn, give more contrast to the golden details - especially the choker (quite an unfortunate name, isn't it).

I could go all out on details like how the sleeves of the dresses and the way they are worn hint at the personalities of the characters, and the shades of purple and grey I used for the faces are set in similar ways, and how I used basically a colour wheel to support the falling motion, and how the Evil Queen looks a lot more lovingly for various reasons linked to one of my interpretations of her character ... But I already wrote it twice and at the end of the day, it doesn't matter to you as much in written word as in the effect it should had and that it supposedly doesn't have, because I could make it work the way I truly wanted to. Maybe, just maybe, it will be a case like All-Kinds-of-Fur where I need to repeat it over the years until I get it just right. For now I'm just glad to finally post it.

For the future, I plan more fairytail pieces. I've got three more fairly detailed sketches in my books. I just say so much: I already failed three attempts and two completely different plans for a Snow White and Rose Red piece, so it may only take another eternity to get that done!