The queen

Black gel pen on drawing paper--a magazine ad was used as a reference for the face, and pictures found on google were used as references for the raven and the roses.

More work went into this drawing than I usually put out, first in sketching the layout, then in the inking itself (I need to get some India ink or something--all of those black spaces were inked in by hand with an ordinary black gel pen), and then halfway through the inking process when it Was Not Working and I just hated it. It's been fixed, though my pencil marks when I was trying to decide what to do with the hairline would not be erased for love or money, and since I'm not on my own computer I don't have a way to remove them digitally. I guess we'll all just have to deal with it.

This is one in a series of illustrations I hope to do for my short story 'Snow', a retelling of the Snow White fairy tale. It is the queen, Snow's mother (not step-mother; the Brothers Grimm, when they collected folk stories, often changed a negative mother figure into a wicked stepmother, because aren't we all a little squicked out by a mother hurting her own child?), when she first arrives to marry the king. Excerpt:

II. Mother

It had been snowing when the queen came.

She came from a land far away, and had been carried all the way in a palanquin shrouded in black velvet. The queen could not bear the touch of sunlight; her skin was white like the snow, and took no color, unless it was the silver of the moonlight she loved. Her hair and eyes were black, like a night with no moon and no stars, when everything else in all the world was dead. The only color in her was in her lips, which were as red as blood. With her came a mute man servant, a wizened crone of a maid, and and a great black raven. This bird had come to her in the tower room of her father's castle, bedraggled and weary, and the princess had kept it, and looked into its one remaining eye, and there were those who said she spoke to it. There were others who said it spoke back. It rode on her shoulder like a pet and bit the fingers of those stupid enough to try and touch it.

The king did not particularly notice the bird, it seemed. He met his bride, made by arrangement, on the snow powdered steps of his castle, and from that moment he was transfixed by her beauty, which was very great indeed, and he went to his knees in the snow before her. The queen smiled a cold, proud smile, and the king wedded her in the snow of the chapel grove. The snow continued to fall. The people whispered, as people do, and the whispers went out from the city like ripples until they washed against the feet of the encircling mountains. The queen was a witch they said, who was holding the king in thrall. The queen had come from the winter night they said, and breathed out the bitter cold that brought death. The queen was a simulacrum they said, made of snow and red rose petals (and heartsblood, they said) by a sorceress far away, and this they said was why the queen bore no children. These things may have been true, and may have been false, but the queen was indeed very beautiful, and the king was indeed enthralled by her, but for all that there was no heir.