No Frigate Like a Book

Inktober day 9: Nest

Day 10: Crabby

Day 11: Eagle

Day 12: Forget

fairytales which tell you to be both kind and clever fairytales that say to be kind is to be clever and to be clever is to be kind fairytales that say the cleverest thing you can ever do is choose kindness and that cruelty or thoughtlessness are always foolish but not kindness never kindness

you bring oil for the gate and food for the dog and clean out the oven and bake bread in it and the oven will hide you and the dog will not betray you and the gate will stay open for you and close on your pursuers, to be clever is just to know that if you are good in a world made of rules, goodness will be returned to you.

In [fairy tales], power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness —from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis.

— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

Has anybody else noticed that it seems that nobody tells children fairytales anymore? It seems that they only read them books or have them watch movies; oral storytelling appears to have vanished. Perhaps it’s just in my area, but it has quite literally been years since my friends, family, and I have met a child who has even referenced a fairytale character that didn’t appear in a Disney movie.

When I was little, my sister would sew before she went to bed. She’d make up stories for me as she worked–one in particular about a walking, talking cat named Calico who went on adventures, painted pictures, and eventually fell in with a pirate-hunting merchant ship captain named Martin (after my own cat).

Those stories were a lot of what got me into writing, but they were also incredibly fun. Telling kids stories is awesome and we should all do ut more often.

Not only that, but kids yearn for oral tradition! With my first grade class we would have a tea party for their birthdays or any particularly special day, and during that time when we had our tea and shortbread cookies we would play this game called “How Goes?”

I would ask them in a very English accent what happened on their way to tea, saying “So-and-so, how goes?”

And they would launch into this dramatic account about the CRAZY STUFF that happened (all untrue but they were learning to tell engaging narratives and patterns and order of events and such)

Then after I would tell them a fairytale just based on memory, but a lot of times I would retell it to suit my fancy or make it a little more kindly (because that’s something I always do, make the stories a little more happy, a little more kind). Anyhow, they LOVED IT. And every time we had tea, I would tell a different tale because we never repeated the stories.

Furthermore, one day they decided to make up their own story based on a classmate with quite finicky shoes titled “The Boy Whose Shoes Wouldn’t Come Off.” I wrote it down for them, but they ultimately decided the order of things and what happened and the ending.

Storytelling is a magical experience that is well-loved and precious, and we should very much endeavor to continue the tradition however we can!

Story-telling is something adults enjoy too.  I try to keep it reined in, because this gets annoying if you do it too much, but when I’ve asked permission to tell a Greek mythology story, people will be absolutely riveted.  And someone telling a good story to me will keep me just as spellbound.  Everybody, regardless of age, loves a good story.

Storytelling is why people love roleplaying games.

Hello it’s been awhile since I’ve posted any art! Have this historically-inspired Belle as compensation.

DO NOT remove my caption, edit, crop, or repost.

Reblogging with these closeups bc tumblr loves to fuzz my images

After the occupation, the princess was confined to the palace.

Once a month she'd be taken on a walk around the city, heavily guarded of course, to show the people that she still lived. It also served, of course, as a reminder of what they stood to lose if they made trouble. The princess did her best go wave and smile and give the people what encouragement she could.

The rest of the time, her life was spent in musty rooms and dusty towers. She filled most of her time scouring the castle for materials which she would sew into more and more elaborate outfits, which she would show off on the days when she was allowed outside.

Indeed, the public loved their princess and her dresses so much they'd often sketch or paint them along the route and pass the images on so that all could see the princess at least was well.

This pleased the occupiers for two reasons. First: it kept the princess out of trouble. Second: it gave them a reason to sneer and they did love a good sneer.

"What a vain creature she is!" They would remark.

"Doesn't even care we murdered her brothers so long as she gets enough satin to make her little dresses!" They squawked.

This was unfair, of course, for to call her creations "little dresses" was to call Queen Murderfun the Needlessly Genocidal "a tad piquey". Her dresses were gravity-defying wonders lace and pearl. They were thunderstorms captured in velvet and waterfalls summoned in silk. She was a wizard with silk.

Still, she bore their mockery with a tight smile and careful deference.

"Please, good sirs, my home, my people and my city now belong to you. Let me keep, at least, this one last joy."

And they sneered and they crowed most unpleasantly, but they let her keep her sewing room.

Of course, they would have known their mockery to be doubly unfair had they realised the true purpose of the princess's elaborate designs. For hidden in the intricate embroiderings across her gowns, jackets and fans, the princess had encoded secret (and very detailed) messages. When she would go on her monthly walk, the city's loyalists would line the route, sketching down the patterns to decode later.

Thus did the princess transmit all the occupiers' secrets (unearthed while supposedly 'searching the castle for old fabrics') to the city and thus did she build her resistance.

On the day the revolution finally came, she girded herself in armour of thick spider silk and whale bone. She cut a fine figure with a lacy handkerchief in her top pocket and a razor sharp knitting needle keeping her hair up.

As she waltzed through the castle to open the door for her army, the Usurper King tried to stop her and she simply unfolded her handkerchief and showed it to him.

Upon seeing the impossible arcane pattern emblazoned across it, he fell to the floor with blood streaming from his eyes.

She always had been a wizard with silk.

East of the Sun, West of the Moon

I have a huge weak spot for this fairytale. I had a huge old illustrated children's book of this fairytale when I was little and it really stuck with me all these years. EotSWotM is a fairytale in the realm of Eros and Psyche spin offs, Beauty and the Beast also falls into this trope but EotSWotM follows the older myth a little more closely with the Prince/Beast character sleeping beside her each night in his human form. Do you know/remember this fairytale?

I struggled a lot with the depiction of the Northern Lights in this illustration. I tried a whole bunch of greens and purples but they felt too radical for the rest of the color palette. I'll probably want to revisit this linear again someday to push the illustration to it's best version of itself. Also yes, she does usually have black hair, the background simply absorbed it too much as is.

I am the artist! Do not post without permission & credit! Thank you! Come visit me over on: instagram.com/ellenartistic or tiktok: @ellenartistic

The Wild Swans

This illustration is inspired by the fairytale "The Wild Swans" (Hans Christian Andersen's version of the tale) which has has a ton of variations like: "Six Swans" or "The Seven Ravens", etc. The basics of the story include a widowed King with 7 to 12 children and an evil stepmother that curses all of the children except the youngest daughter into swans. To save her brothers the youngest is given a terrible task involving nettles. My favorite retelling of this fairytale is easily 'Daughter of the Forest' by Juliet Marillier (I would recommend it for an older teens/adult fiction audience). Have any of you ever read it? Or let me know your favorite version of the fairytale I am always looking for more! :D

I am the artist! Do not post without permission & credit! Thank you! Come visit me over on: instagram.com/ellenartistic or tiktok: @ellenartistic

"You never complain about Stone Soup."

"I like Stone Soup," said the cow. "Stone Soup is an honest con. We get a meal, everyone thinks they've seen a little bit of magic, you sell the stone for a little bit of pocket money, you pick up another stone at the next town. Everyone gets something."

"And if I remember right, you were the one who suggested we steal the magic beans."

"That wasn't stealing, that was a legitimate trade."

"A legitimate trade for a talking cow that disappeared by morning?"

"He didn't even lock the barn! How is that my fault?" She huffed and laid her head onto her forelimbs. The stalk of grass in her lips wobbled with her scowl. "Old fool never knew what he had."

Jack hummed. He craned forward to get a better look into the tiny, cracked glass, pulled gently at the corner of his eye and delicately dabbed the makeup brush.

"My point is," said the cow, "this all seems rather - cruel."

Jack turned. One half of his face was magnificently painted in faerie shades of blues and violets. The other half was just confused. "What on earth are you talking about?"

"For gods' sake, Jack, this is a perfectly innocent girl who you plan on humiliating in front of the royal court."

"How would she be humiliated? As far as she'll know, she'll have a lovely time at a lovely ball in a lovely ballgown."

"You don't have a lovely ballgown!"

"Well I can't afford a ballgown, now can I?!"

"So you're going to make her waltz in her fucking underclothes?!"

He took a dramatic breath. "Look," he said, brandishing the makeup brush. "If it worked on the fucking emperor, it'll work on a fucking scullery maid. If she gets told by a fairy that she's wearing a fairy dress that can only be seen by intelligent people, she is going to believe like hell that she's wearing the very image of sartorial extravaganza."

The brush was masterfully twiddled. "And when everyone else finds out that she's wearing a fairy dress that can only be seen by intelligent people, there won't be a single person in that room who would dare to disagree."

The cow shook her head. "I don't know, Jack," she sighed. "I just don't know."

"It'll be fine," Jack said, turning back to the tiny glass and bringing a deft hand again on the canvas. "Trust me. How did you do finding the slippers?"

"Couldn't find crystal," said the cow. "Best I could get were a glass set from an elf down at the cobbler's."

Jack hummed. "Well, they shouldn't be that important. Nobody will look too closely at her shoes."

There were two guards at the palace gate, slabs of meat and muscle wrapped in candybright costumes. They looked every bit as solid as the iron gate between them, and looked like the kind of guard prepared for every kind of foolishness they'd see tonight.

They weren't prepared for the woman who stepped down from the cow-drawn wagon. Her slippers gleamed amber in the torchlight, and her dress was... It was...

Well, the fey who hung over her shoulder told them that her dress was a beautiful thing, spun from the glimmer of starlight, the sound of snowfall, and the colour of the moon. He said that any discerning gentleman could tell that this was true, and the guards agreed.

Neither of them had looked too closely at the dress. In fact, they had been trying to carefully, politely and inexplicably avert their gaze.

Keep reading

I know I’m being an insufferable worldbuilding nerd here, but my basic metric for evaluating media with very inhuman protagonists is “how easily can one offer a complete and coherent account of this media’s plot without ever mentioning the fact that the protagonist is, for example, a talking car?”. The harder it is, the higher it scores.

@hewwbwazew I would LOVE to read this holy shit

@territorialoak​ I hope you don’t mind me adding your tags here, that story is just too good and I’m Obsessed

also @gilgamemesh​ I feel like this is your vibe too

"Little Brier-Rose"

Illustration for "The Sleeping Beauty" by Grimm Brothers, made for Brühler Whiskyhaus

Many young wizards have taken to transmuting swans into humans and marrying them. One day, you are lucky enough to find a swan in the wild, and without hesitating, you turn it into a beautiful lady. Unfortunately, that ‘swan’, was a goose. You have just given a goose a human form.

After I explained the mistake, she laughed uproariously.

“You’re damn lucky I’m not a swan!” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. “They get by on their reputation for being pretty and graceful, but buddy, a swan ain’t nothing but a bigger, meaner goose. What do you all want swan wives for anyway?”

I opened my mouth and then shut it again. Honestly, I hadn’t actually stopped to think about that much. It had become a mark of status, having a demure, graceful woman following on your arm, always dressed in white and gazing soulfully about.

“They all seem very nice,” I said finally.

She pursed her lips thoughtfully as she finished pulling on the robes I’d brought with me. “Then there’s something else going on,” she said. “I’ve met my share of swans and not a one of them would put up with that shit. Are you sure they were swans to begin with?”

“Well, no, now that you mention it. I mean, everyone says that’s what they are, but I’ve never actually seen anyone else do it.”

“Do they talk? Act like humans? Do they seem intelligent?”

“Well, they are humans, so I suppose they must be, right?” This conversation was not going the way I had expected it to.

“Hah! Fat chance. Transmutation is just changing the shape of a thing. You turn a swan into a human and all you’ve done is put a swan mind in a human-shaped box. Wouldn’t do a wizard much good to be able to turn into a wolf or whatever if they suddenly only had a wolf’s brain to work with, would it?”

“So, you’re saying that if those women were swans originally, they’d still act like swans?”

“Hoo boy yeah,” she said. “Absolutely. Hissing, biting people, trying to build nests, shitting everywhere. The works.”

“Wait, but what about you?” I asked, desperately trying to get the conversation back on track. “You seem like a human, but you were a goose ten minutes ago.”

She grinned wickedly at me.

“I was shaped like a goose ten minutes ago,” she said. “And I appreciate the makeover. But I wasn’t a goose to begin with. Now come on. There’s something hella creepy going on around here, and we’re gonna figure out what.”

She started walking back up the path towards town.

“Wait!” I shouted, hurrying after her, “If you weren’t a goose, then what are you? And what’s your name?”

“You can call me Gwydd,” she said. “And as for what I am, it’s a long story. I’ll tell you some day. But first, you’re going to tell me everything you know about these swan ladies.”