The Rose Elf
Welcome, my friends, to the very first story of August Chills 2021!
(scroll down for giveaway instructions)
This week’s story is a fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen, Rosen-Alfen, translated to English as The Rose Elf in the beautiful translation of Jean Hersholt. You can hear the story in the video, while I’m making a special little flower pot:
This story has a special place in my heart, because it was my favorite fairytale as a kid (which makes you wonder why it took me as long as it did to realize I’m kinda goth 😂). I must have read it dozens of times, then I didn’t touch the book for years and found it again about a year ago. Honestly? I did not remember how morbid it is… I suspect I didn’t really notice as a kid, I was too charmed with the tiny elf and the idea that flowers had souls, and really, the bad guy got what he deserved, right?
I forgot many of the details, but I remembered well the flower pot, and it breaking to reveal a skull. So I decided to recreate that scene for this project.
The thing with making 3D projects is that you can only capture one angle of them in a photo, so some of the details you can see me working on in the video aren’t visible in the final photo (specifically the roses on the pot), but I don’t mind it much. The project is one thing, its photos are another, both are artworks in their own right and I love both. This will be the case with all of the August Chills projects this year, what can I say? I’m in a sculpturing mood ;)
I wanted to create the broken pot with the skull peeking out, and although there’s no description of it in the story, I decided to paint roses on it as a nod to its hero - the Rose Elf. I made sure to make them nice and crackly to fit with the existing cracks on the pot I used and the mood of the story.
The skull was sculpted in foam, it was the first time I used this kind of sculpting technique. Till now I always used clay, building up my image, and this time I dug it out of the foam. It was a lot of fun and I really love the texture of it, I don’t think it fits everything, but I’ll definitely play with it again!
The Jasmine was made from paper, using some classic shaping and structuring techniques. It’s pretty amazing how much detail you can add to these plants! For the flower-souls I wanted tiny figures that were reminiscent enough of a human form to identify but still quite amorphous, so I chose to use transparent material. I’m really happy I managed to give them tiny-tiny spears!
I had a lot of fun making the pot and then had some more fun creating the breaking scene. I chose one image as the final piece that will be in the giveaway, but here’s a couple more I really like:
I hope you enjoyed this week’s story and video, check out the details for the giveaway bellow and I’ll see you next week!
xx
Naama
Giveaway!
For full details visit the August Chills 2021 main page
3 lucky winners will get one signed art print of the story their choice!
The print for this week’s story:
The giveaway will be on my YouTube, Instagram and Facebook and follow the instructions there. I collected the links to this week’s posts here, visit them all for a better chance to win!
like the video, subscribe to my channel & leave a comment
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like the post, like my page & leave a comment
The giveaway will close August 31, winners will be announced and contacted on the first week of September.
Good luck!