In truth, sometimes I learn a lot more from my less successful illustrations. And like a good folk tale, I learn a little something with each painting and each story along the way.
Some turn out really well and others are just so-so, but I keep right on going, frog after frog, until that one that breaks through and feels a bit more exceptional. In fact, I often feel like that’s the case with my daily paintings. And just the idea of kissing a few frogs to find a prince is a fun concept. Seems the modern retelling of a kiss is probably the best bet in the end. The weird part here is that it immediately says “behold, there stood before her a handsome young prince” and we have only the word handsome to assume he even still had a head. This is probably good in the case of The Frog Prince as there’s even a Scottish version where the princess takes an axe and chops off the frog’s head. I’ve always been fascinated with folk tales, mostly because the story we often know today is so different from the original. And it also prompted the phrase, “sometimes you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince.” Despite it never being a part of the story, somewhere along the way the idea that the princess kissed the frog to break the spell became commonplace. Oddly, in all of the original written versions of this tale, there’s never a mention of any kiss breaking the spell, though the violent ending was thankfully later replaced with having the frog spend three nights on the princess’s pillow. It all ends rather alarmingly with her throwing the frog against the wall in desperation and he magically transforms back into a prince. In this telling of the story a spoiled princess loses a golden ball, a frog helps her retrieve it, she makes a promise to be a companion to the frog, tries to break it, then is told by the king she shouldn’t be such a jerk and break her promises. Versions of the story have appeared in folklore and one of the more commonly known is Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s version. There’s a rather curious tale known as The Frog Prince.
0 kommentar(er)
