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#east of the sun and west of the moon
artist-ellen · 5 months
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East of the Sun, West of the Moon
I have a huge weak spot for this fairytale. I had a huge old illustrated children's book of this fairytale when I was little and it really stuck with me all these years. EotSWotM is a fairytale in the realm of Eros and Psyche spin offs, Beauty and the Beast also falls into this trope but EotSWotM follows the older myth a little more closely with the Prince/Beast character sleeping beside her each night in his human form. Do you know/remember this fairytale?
I struggled a lot with the depiction of the Northern Lights in this illustration. I tried a whole bunch of greens and purples but they felt too radical for the rest of the color palette. I'll probably want to revisit this linear again someday to push the illustration to it's best version of itself. Also yes, she does usually have black hair, the background simply absorbed it too much as is.
I am the artist! Do not post without permission & credit! Thank you! Come visit me over on: instagram.com/ellenartistic or tiktok: @ellenartistic
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tomoleary · 7 months
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Kay Nielsen “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” (1913-1914)
Most, if not all, of these have appeared on Tumblr but finding so many Nielsen images (from one book) of such quality and I couldn’t resist. There are more out there, too. Beautiful work.
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the-evil-clergyman · 2 years
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East O’ the Sun and West O’ the Moon, from Through Fairy Halls of My Bookhouse by Donn P. Crane (1925)
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elettralightwood · 10 months
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The young heroine refused to give up hope—she would ride the very wind to rescue her love from imprisonment.
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Clary and Jace if they were in East of the Sun & West of the Moon
- art by Cassandra Jean
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waltcrewlog · 2 months
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Kay Nielsen illustrations for East of the Sun and West of the Moon
Kay Nielsen (1886 - 1957) was a Danish illustrator known for his distinctive graphic, intricate style. He was born to actors, and the influence of the performing arts is reflected in the detailed costumes and patterns of his artwork. He first studied painting in Paris and during his time there, he created a collection of pen and ink illustrations depicting literature and personal experiences, which garnered him an invitation to exhibit his work in London. He moved there in 1910, had his first exhibition in 1912, and worked on several gift book illustration commissions in the following years, including East of the Sun and West of the Moon. He had his first American exhibition in 1917, but following World War I, the popularity of such expensive illustration books waned. Nielsen left London and found work as a costume and set designer for the Royal Theater in Copenhagen, where he worked on productions of The Tempest and Aladdin. While in Denmark, he still found some work illustrating books for English publishers, including editions of Hans Christian Andersen and Brothers Grimm stories. Then in 1936, he went to California to work with his friend and colleague Johannes Poulsen (who had worked on Aladdin with him) to create the sets and costumes for a production of Everyman at the Hollywood Bowl and decided to remain in the States. In 1937, he found employment at Disney where he produced magnificent work for the "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence in Fantasia and created concept art for an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid." Decades later when Disney eventually did make an adaptation of this fairy tale, the filmmakers put Nielsen's name in the credits as a visual developer, demonstrating how influential his work continues to be. He was laid off by Disney in 1941 and afterward, worked as a muralist and chicken farmer. By the time of his death in 1957, he had fallen into poverty and obscurity. But by the 1970s, interest in his work had revitalized and continues to this day, for the originality, elegance, and decor of his style is truly one-of-a-kind.
photo sources [x][x]
research sources [x] and "Kay Nielsen's Life and Work: Artist, Designer, Innovator" by Kendra Daniel from the Taschen edition of East of the Sun and West of the Moon edited by Noel Daniel
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lily-of-elysium · 1 year
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Illustration by Kay Nielsen from East of the Sun and West of the Moon (1914)
Source: Wikimedia Commons
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ifindus · 9 months
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East of the Sun and West of the Moon - art collab with @idkhowthiswork! I made the sketch and they did the lineart and colouring ✨ The other part of the collab is on their blog - check it out here.
We each picked a Norwegian story/fairytale/myth to illustrate as we are both Norwegian and both love the 1800s fairytales of Norway. I went with East of the Sun and West of the Moon, the sketch itself inspired by the work of Th. Kittelsen.
East of the Sun and West of the Moon is a Norwegian fairytale about a beautiful young woman who is traded by her parents to a white bear in exchange for making her poor family rich. The woman and the white bear lives together in a great beautiful castle inside the mountain. The white bear is in reality a bewitched prince who is only human at night, cursed by his stepmother. When the young woman sees his face one night, the prince has to leave her and go to the Queen’s castle, which lies east of the sun and west of the moon. The woman goes out looking for her prince and is aided by three old women and all the four wind currents until she reaches the castle east of the sun and west of the moon. There the prince is set to marry a trollwoman, but he does not want her. He manages to escape the marriage by saying he will only marry the one who can clean his shirt. The trolls only make it dirtier, but the young woman cleans it for him, which makes the trolls so angry they burst and the prince and the young woman leave the castle with all their gold and silver.
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thebeautifulbook · 2 years
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EAST OF THE SUN AND WEST OF THE MOON: OLD TALES FROM THE NORTH by Peter Christian Asbjørnsen (1812-1885), Jørgen Engebretsen Moe (1813-1882), Sir George Webbe Dasent (1817-1896). (New York: Doran, c.1922). Illustrated by Kay Nielsen (1886-1957).
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Originally published in 1914.
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cmonbartender · 6 months
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East of the Sun and West of the Moon (1889) - Henry Justice Ford
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qernna · 1 year
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Doing some plans for linocuts :)
Inspired by one of my favourite fairy tales
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arinewman7 · 1 year
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The North Wind goes over the Sea
Illustration by Kay Nielsen
from “East of the Sun and West of the Moon”, 1914
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aquietjune · 6 months
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Little Bird Revision Progress Update
For Chapter 2, good enough to go (it's not like I will ever be satisfied with anything, anyway), so it'll be probably released on Thursday. See you then!
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princess-ibri · 2 years
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I'd like to know; how do you think Don Bluth's Beauty and the Beast would have turned out? I wish everyone would have been able to watch it. Just what would have been though I am not really into this Beast's design maybe the Baboon design that Disney turned down?
Hey! Thank you for your patience I wanted to have time to give this ask a proper reply, with some pictures. Overall I think it would have done well in the way of becoming a cult classic, full of beautiful images and plenty of nightmare fuel but rather cluttered in the way that most Don Bluth films tend to be, something that definitely adds to their charm but keeps them from becoming as popular as the more streamlined Disney Renaissance movies they were competing with at the time.
In terms of plot I feel like it would have taken a lot of influence from the 1946 Jean Cocteau BatB movie, as well as some influences from the original Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve version, along with some of The Grimm Brothers and Abhorsen and Moe’s “The Singing Springing Lark/Lily and the Lion/East of the Sun West of the Moon” bits, as I will explain below.
I think the Cocteau influences would have been seen most in the primary look/atmosphere of the film, we can see a lot of his dark dreamlike Romantic influences in the clothing and set design of this poster in particular. The Beast and Belle’s clothes could have come straight out of the 1946 film.
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This dark dreamlike atmosphere of that film would have worked quite well with Bluth’s style of filmography which tended towards that sort of Fever Dream Unreality in many ways. But of course we also have the abundance of side characters with their own small arcs (and animal sidekicks inexplicably wearing clothes) in the mix as well. We get most of our information about them and the themes of the film from this page:
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From this we gain the main theme of the film ‘a thing must be loved before it is loveable’, and several names of our animal/fairy sidekicks. Below we can see Beauty with Nan the clairvoyant dog, with Otto the escape artist lizard on top of Nan. The bird on her finger could be Max the bird detective in a more realistic design then the one with him in the large hat, or possibly just a random bird to go with the random squirrels. Wether these characters would have been true animals with quirky traits or people transformed like the Beast I don’t know, though with Bluth’s other films to go off of I tend to believe they were likely just funky animals who would have used their skills to try and help Beauty unravel the mystery of the Beast and his cursed castle.
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Try as I might I couldn’t find any depictions of the King Bats that were mentioned (fairly sure I have Queen Livia and the Wee Beasties though, we’ll get to that in a moment) so I wonder if they were later replaced with these wolves? They sound like they would have e been aligned with the villain in any case.
Here’s where we get to the ‘Singing Springing Lark/Lily and the Lion/East of the Sun West of the Moon’ influences I think would have been in the film. As we can see in the picture below we have Beauty and a very much human prince fleeing from the wolves on Pegusus back— in these versions of the BatB story the heroine is forced to go on a journey to rescue the prince from an evil princess, after his Beast initial curse is broken. She is usually aided by the Wind, riding its back to go and find him, and in the Grimm version the pair escape via Gryphon. It’s not to hard to imagine Don Bluth deciding to swap out a Gryphon for a more majestic and recognizable looking Pegasus for his lovers to escape on once they’ve been reunited.
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And of course we have the villain of our story, who I’m pretty sure is meant to be this Queen Livia. I mean look at this lady, all deathly pale and decked out in villainous green, pretty sure that a crown on her head as well. In the original Villeneuve version the Prince is cursed into a Beast by a wicked fairy after he refuses to marry her, I could totally see this woman cursing people left and right. Add that to how the Prince in the sketch version below seems to be facing off against this sinister looking woman’s head and I think it’s a good guess to say that Bluth’s BatB would have had a similar premise.
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I’ve also pulled out charters I’m very sure are meant to be Beauty’s father and sisters (the smaller head by the Father possibly being a sketch of their mother?) once more pointing to following the old traditional tale where Beauty is faced with opposition from her sisters as well.
We’ve also got a lot of sketches of what I’m assuming are the Wee Beasties, who are 1000% precursors to the Jitterbugs we later see in Thumbelina, along with some more butterfly like fairies, who could possibly be grouped in as a prettier type of Wee Beastie or just be fairies.
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So yeah, I think it overall would have followed the tone of the Cocteau film, with some added animal and fairy sidekick shenanigans as Beauty tries to discover the secret of the Beast, eventually culminating in her discovering he’s been cursed by the evil Queen Livia who seeks to marry him. The climax would be that after Beauty has broken the Beat spell by professing her love he’s whisked away by Livia to her wolf guarded home base, and Beauty and her friends have to rescue him and defeat the evil Queen once and for all, with her and the Prince escaping via Pegasus to ride off into their happily ever after (oh and with his mask I’m thinking maybe Livia gives a masked ball or something to celebrate her wedding with the Prince and Beauty crashes it).
Per the Beasts design I dont really. Ind it so much. It is a bit close to the Disney one but honestly I still preorder a composite Beast over one based solely in one animal sorry 😅 But I did find some alternatives designs for him for you!
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Some of these are straight up goblin-y I love it 😆
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Kay Nielsen. Illustration from 'East of the Sun and West of the Moon', 1914.
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East of the Sun and West of the Moon (1914), Kay Nielsen//Meditation On The Threshold: A Bilingual Anthology Of Poetry, ‘Dido’s Lament’, Rosario Castellanos (by defromitittes on tumblr)//Grief Lessons, Anne Carson (by 10-813-08 on tumblr)//Meditation On The Threshold: A Bilingual Anthology Of Poetry, ‘Presence’, Rosario Castellanos (by deformititties on tumblr)
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fairytalemovies · 10 months
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Maria Bonnevie as the youngest princess in Kvitebjørn kong Valemon (1991).
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