How Dare You – Part 3
June 24, 2025
If you missed the previous parts and want to read them first, just click on the links:
Part 1 Part 2
"If things are as you say, I will allow you to take as much rapunzel as you want. But under one condition: You must give me the child that your wife will bring to the world. It will do well, and I will take care of it like a mother."
—The Witch
—The Witch
Now why would the Witch make such an extreme demand?
That’s one of the questions I asked myself to figure out her background story, so I could understand her character.
Based on her own words, she wants to care for the child like a mother. Did she miss her window of opportunity to conceive, through lack of good suitors? Could she not bear a child? It makes her character more complex and interesting to think she wants the baby out of desperation rather than malice.
How does this inform her visual representation you ask? I’d like to think that believing that she’s not evil helped me convey a certain softness.
Witches in fairy tales are often ugly, though sometimes as beautiful as they are malevolent. I wanted the Witch to be neither ugly nor beautiful because I didn’t want her physical appearance to be a point of discussion. It’s totally irrelevant to the story whether she’s attractive or not.
She does have a very pretty dress on though! Should she be wearing a plainer frock based on her social status? Probably. Then again, she might be a single woman of means, owning a lucrative business selling potions and lotions. Or something.
I was inspired by dresses from a few sources, but the main ones where these two tapestries:
Close-ups on some tapestries I shared in Part 2
As for the Husband, I made him a merchant. Mainly so I could treat myself by drawing some more nice clothes.
In hindsight, although he wasn’t the intended inspiration, the Husband reminds me of Prince Humperdinck in The Princess Bride 😳
Prince Humperdinck
I purposefully made him look a bit old for a first-time father, since the tale starts with “Once upon a time there was a man and a woman who had long, but to no avail, wished for a child.”
The Husband’s pose changed slightly after I sent the first sketch to my brother, who had notes… To be fair to him, he’s an animator, so body language and ‘action lines’ are his area of expertise. He very sweetly sent me a few reference photos of himself acting as the Husband, for me to copy his pose. I created a mix of his pose and the one I’d already done.
Rough sketch, after I sent it to my brother as you can see I started figuring out how I would change the position of one of the legsThis concludes the process for my Folio Book Illustration Award entry!
I’m sorry to say I didn’t make it to the longlist. I was briefly disappointed, but this text message from a friend who also entered the competition cheered me up:
The Folio longlist came out!! They forgot to include us, weird
Judith xx
Monthly inspiration
O’Donoghue and I share some traits: she laughs and cries easily, she sometimes snorts when she laughs, and when she finds something that someone said funny, she repeats it in a higher pitched voice. And I must not hate those traits in myself, because I very much enjoy listening to her!
There’s currently a sub-theme to the podcast: Magical Garbage. It covers a lot of very good fantasy movies that shaped us as kids/teenagers, including one I mentioned above: The Princess Bride.
Some other films I very much enjoyed revisiting with O'Donoghue and her guests’ clever analysis are: Shrek, The Lord of The Rings, and Labyrinth.
I am, obviously, LOVING this series.
Want to get this blog directly in your inbox each month? Just subscribe to my Inspired Substack.
