Close ups:
After lots of rough sketches at the beginning of my project, I started with the idea of depicting a real Queen in a castle looking at her phone – this however didn’t take into account the idea of a modern day setting and it was an undeveloped idea. From this, I began to think about modernising the story and making the character a teenage ‘queen bee’. I played around with textures and colours for my final designs before deciding on a outcome, I thought the textured and patterns background added to the detail and character of the illustration.
Retold Fairytale: For Snow White’s fairytale I wanted to retell the story from a different perspective, the evil Queen’s. Today some young adults are obsessed with social media and as I spoke about earlier, dopamine is released everytime we get a like or a new follower and it makes us feel good. This has caused some social media users to have an obsession with how many likes and followers they are receiving. Bringing this back to Snow White in a modern day setting, I wanted to depict the Queen as being one of these obsessed social media users. She is teenage girl called ‘Queenie’, she is queen bee, she’s very popular and gets jealous or angry at anyone who she sees as a threat to her social media status. Instead of a mirror the Queen looks a iPhone to see who is the fairest in the land but to her anger she sees that it is not her but Snow White who has 8.3 million followers and is loved by all, this makes her envious and bitter which in the end as we know from the original fairytale, will be her ultimate downfall. This fairytale I hope will bring awareness that things like how many followers you have or how many likes you are getting doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about it as you don’t want to turn out like the evil Queen in Snow White – bitter, jealous and twisted.
I wanted to depict the Queen as a teenage girl in her bedroom, surrounded by posters like ‘keep calm and stay lush’ and photos of her and her friends – implying she is popular, the queen bee and likes it that way. As she looks an Snow White’s Instagram account and take in how many followers she has and how great her posts are, she gets jealous and annoyed that she is more popular than her. I created the illustration around her make up dresser, reinforcing the idea that she is obsessed with beauty and vainity. Using watercolour, waxed crayon, fine liner and felt tip I experimented with mediums to find the right mediums I wanted to use. in my final illustration.