I can't exactly pinpoint when it happened, but somewhere along the way this year I fell in love with the idea of redoing particular fairytales to capture the darker side of their true nature. Perhaps it's the adult in me now looking back at the stories I grew up on and seeing the ugly beasts within these characters--or maybe I just have a warped view. Either way, here is a collection of my illustrations so far.
The first in this series, Red Riding Hood captures that twisted line between innocense and depravity. For her, the antagonist is the wolf, unless you are the wolf in which case red is your beast of burden.
For my second illustration, I picked Peter Pan, the man--boy who used the guise of everlasting youth to steal children away in the night so he would never have to grow up or be alone. Though Hook is his antagonist, in truth, he is his reality check trying to knock some sense into his warped world.
Alice in Wonderland makes the perfect 3rd illustration in this series. The Queen of Hearts may be her antagonist, but Alice is the unstable one here, bringing us down the rabbit hole of her insanity, leading us to believe she is but an innocent victimized bystandard.
The 4th in my series is Pinocchio. Finding the antagonist wasn't easy, as he had many possible characters, but in the end--for me--the whale swallowing him whole kind of reflected them all. A liar and a thief, Pinocchio is the victim of his own actions.
Dorothy
The 5th in my series, I decided to go with contrasting colors to capture that kind of tone that the original motion picture had in technicolor. I also made the antagonist sit behind Dorothy to overshadow her without actually laying across her.