The Lad and the Devil

Ideas and development

I began my creative process by drawing out key scenes/quotes from the story, in order to help me generate ideas. I decided to combine two of my sketches, as the final sentences with the blacksmith breaking open the nut stood out vividly in my head.

I then moved on to doing some loose character sketches of the blacksmith, as I decided he was going to be central to my piece. I wanted to play around with his expressions, body language, and movement to see how I could best convey his emotion of frustration and anger in a single frame.

Once I had decided on how I wanted to represent the blacksmith, I did some rough outlines of the setting, and details such as the smoke, and the way I wanted to illustrate the exploding of the nut. I also played around with how I would illustrate the devil being set free; after drawing these two versions I think I would like to have the devil’s face rising from the smoke as it appears much more ominous. Although I really like this version of the piece with everything monochromatic except for the devil and the smoke, I think I want to experiment with some colourful media as well.

After doing some further research into Norweigan folklore, I found that the devil is portrayed as less dangerous and powerful than  Satan in the Bible, and despite being supernatural and hostile to humans, in Nordic folktales he is often simple and easily deceived. Therefore, I decided to experiment with designing the devil in more detail, as in my original sketch he doesn’t portray the naivety that he traditionally represents in the folklore. I took inspiration from the original illustrations published with this story, created by Otto Sinding in 1879, as well as other folktales that Sinding illustrated in which the devil is involved. I think that the sketch in which the devil’s expression is split, shown at the bottom of the page, is the one I’ll include in my final piece. This is because it shows both his ignorance, in his annoyance of being deceived again, and his menacing nature.

The final stage in my development is experimenting with media, I have decided that I would like the piece to feature some vibrant colours so I have chosen media that I know I can achieve this with easily. Although I think the colour pencil and oil pastel work quite well, I’ve decided to use acrylic paint in my final piece, as it is the media that will allow me to create the widest range of tones and colour, as well as add in texture and small details.