Nursery Rhyme and Myth

Just so you don't think I'm getting lazy (hah!), here's my most recent batch of tiny art in inked-but-not-coloured stage. (And for those of you here for bookbinding rather than illustration, don't worry, I'll have plenty of book stuff to post very soon).

The top four are from the nursery rhyme "Hey Diddle Diddle," but with the twist that the main actors are all fairies (hence the wings). The idea came from an ATC swap in which the participants would illustrate fairy tales or nursery rhymes but populate them with actual fairies (if you've studied folklore at all, you'll know that fairy tales often have no fairies to speak of in them).

The bottom four images are not simply pairs of animals, they're pairs of animals from Norse mythology. Odin's ravens are Huginn and Muninn (Thought and Memory), and his wolves are Geri and Freki (Greedy and Covetous; though both names translate as "greedy," the root of "freki" is "covetous"). The two cats are Frejya's Bygul and Trjgul (literally "bee gold" and "tree gold," or more simply Honey and Amber), and the crazy goats are Thor's Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjostr (Tooth-grinder and Tooth-gnasher); both the cats and the goats pull their deity's chariot.

I hope to get them all painted tonight, though that may be a bit ambitious. They need to go in the mail as soon as I can get them there, to make it to their swap host in time.