The Changeling

It is said that sometimes Earthly babies are switched by the Fey. Is this her child or is she doomed to raise a monster?

Trephine

Here is another of the veiled ghostly girls I have done as of late. She is sort of roughly imagined as a Western version of a Ubune, a haunt related to mothering and childbirth. Something sort of wrong about a pregnant ghost, though. Maybe she is Trephine, of the Conomor legend. Conomor was a Britannic king known to slaughter his wives when they became pregnant.

Not really sure why I did it. A lot of these things I don't really plan.

Cora update, sort of...

Back in March, I was in the process of creating a webcomic / graphic story about the girl pictured above. She was intended to be vaguely gothish' I guess you could say, and represented the classical "Queen of the Dead" as found in the old myths of Persephone, or Frya. Her name was even a twist on this Underworld goddess theme, Cora. All was fine and dandy, and it seemed she was all I was concentrating on. She was getting more refined and easier to draw.

This was all great, until we decided to add a member to the houshold.

Guess what? The wife brings home a white dog, sight unseen by me, named Cora. Dogs are normally seen as accompanying many underworld figures, notably Hecate, which Cora (Kore) is seen to be an aspect of. The impact of this was not missed by me. It was all too prophetic in a weird sort of way. Strange, I thought. Then this beast then began to growl at me and in general try to take over the house. She then attacked our other original dog, injuring her very badly. I decided this was too much, and she was a danger to the children, so we sent her away to live at some other dogs at a farm for vicious animals.

I have not drawn Cora since. This whole episode being slightly disturbing. I guessed I would give it a break for a while.

It does make for a good story, however.

Ghostly Veiled Girls...

Lately, I have been practicing drawing with figures of veiled ghostly females. Here is the latest. It is very similar to the others, since I am basically using the same model, and concentrating on different aspects.

The Original Hansel and Gretel?

Another installment of my creepy children's book illustrations. The Wailing Wood is a legend about two small children whose wealthy parents die back in the 17th century. These children are sent to live with their uncle, who really is only interested in their inheritance. He hires a couple of thugs to take them into the woods to kill them. One thug has a change of heart, and kills the other. He cannot bring himself to kill children, so he simply abandons them in the woods. They cry and wail as they slowly starve in the wilderness. The locals think the woods are haunted, and when they finally get up the nerve to see where the wailing was coming from, they find the two children dead in each others arms, covered with leaves. The local birds, Robins, taking pity on the children, covered their remains with a pile of oak leaves.

Some people think this is the origins of the Hansel and Gretel story. I, think the story is much older, and this is just a very similar story, since child abandonment was very common. It was especially common in late medieval and Rennaisance times.

I did this picture with a sort of Victorian twist on it, and the children aren't really from the 17th century. They are also several years older than the ones in the legend, who were literally babies. I have another version with the proper children, but I like this one better.

The Burners

The Third Battle of Hastings...

The Second Battle of Hastings was an infamous duel between the Mods and Rockers in England, back in the mid sixties.

The Third Battle of Hastings has yet to take place, until now...