Plate III — the making

This past month has been the hardest since I started Little Snow White. Sometimes an image simply won't come together, no matter how many attempts, and Plate III has been one of those.

The first composition, the courtyard, kept collapsing on itself. The birds were integral to the scene but at that scale they read as little black ants and could not carry any real detail. I refuse to make an illustration that has to be looked at with a magnifying glass. I realized Plate III should introduce the huntsman, a character the story needs. So the courtyard was let go.

Plan B was Snow White and the huntsman leaving the castle head-on, so I could finally paint the castle I had wanted to paint since the beginning.

But the composition kept becoming about the castle, and less about telling the story. That version had to go too, even though I spent a good couple of weeks on the painting.

This past week the solution finally arrived. A side view of them leaving the castle, still on the drawbridge, so the landscape can open around them and the starkness of what she is about to walk into becomes the frame. A hint of the castle is there but only as a backdrop, not subject. And the huntsman finds his place in the scene, so Plate IV can belong entirely to Snow White.

This is not a new pattern in my process. Sometimes I spend weeks sketching, refining, and even reach advanced stages of painting before I realize the composition itself is the wrong one, that I have been trying to solve too many things in a single frame. The only way through is to start again.

Plate III is coming. I wanted to be sure it felt right first.