Earlier this year Illustrart invited 28 artists to illustrate a deck of Old maid playing cards.
The theme was "fairy tales", with a pre-set list containing mostly Romanian stories.
The story I chose is the "The Old Man's Dutiful Daughter" (my approximate translation).
To summarize, it's about the titular young woman who through a series of circumstances ends up spending a day taking care of a mystical hermit-crone's fierce menagerie of beasts and dragons. In exchange for her pet-sitting services the maiden is then offered the opportunity to pick out a reward from a nearby fanciful creek filled with floating coffers and thrones. Much like Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade she decides to settle for the least ostentatious container, which proves to hold within an almost unending supply of fresh duds and sweet bling. The girl's wicked step mom then goads the girl's wicked step sister into jumping through the same hoops, but the lazy and greedy girl makes a mess of her chores and then foolishly picks one of the nicer looking boxes. Of course, both wicked step sister and wicked step mom are then torn to ribbons and eaten by the dragons, serpents and snakes hiding within the nice box. The dutiful daughter finds a handsome husband. The end.
In terms of style, I originally drew inspiration from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck and Ivan Bilibin's wonderful illustrations. During the process, it seems that I unwittingly channeled some Miyazaki, or at least that's what some people told me
