The Rat Catcher!

Another recent project I have worked on was a fairytale project. It was really quite an interesting project because I learnt a lot about the origins of fairy tales, and how brutal nearly all the early versions of them are. For instance in the original sleeping beauty, the princess is raped in her sleep my her father and gives birth to two children and the only reason she wakes is because on of the children sucks the prick out of her finger. Gruesome!

The story I decided upon was 'the Rat-catcher' also known as the Pied Piper. This tale again had many various endings and reasons behind the story. Some included the children perhaps having a 'dancing disease' so they went crazy and danced out the village to their death and the Rat Catcher himself being the symbol of death, others referred to the children having the plague and that's why they were led out the village. More lurid variations had the Rat Catcher drugging the children and leading them off to a cave were he had his wicked way with them. The one I settled upon to reinterpret was the idea that the Rat Catcher in his rage led the children off to the river and drowned them. The images above are only five of the seven I did because I felt the other two not included were not as strong.

My favourite ones are the first were the rats are invading peoples houses, the second were you can see them been chased out by the Rat Catcher and the final image were the children are drowning. They have all been done in watercolour, pen and ink and on my three favourites i have adjusted the colours for stronger contrasts in photoshop.