Little Red Riding Hoodie goes to the woods....or A Story in Three Panels.

This blog post is about a small experiment in watercolour, cut paper and sequential art.

I was playing around with a watercolour pouring technique.....laying down some fine lines with a masque pen misket then running blue, red, and yellow washes over all. When dried I lifted out (using a water soaked brush only) some background trees and removed the misket with an eraser. I ended up with a small (5 x 8 inch) pretty passable landscape.

But what to actually DO with the landscape? It was pretty bland just by it's self. So......I started to play around with a scenario involving a Little Red Riding Hoodie character I'd made up a while back for a book dummy. I painted a 1 ½ inch drawing of Little Red Riding Hoodie warily entering the woods. So working old school, in real life, I cut the Little Red Riding Hoodie out and taped her where she needed to be in the landscape, and scanned it in. Viola! I had the beginnings of a story.

But then I thought of a “next step”. I decided, for the story “drama” Little Red Riding Hoodie would be followed into the woods by the Big Bad Wolf, in brite green shoes and biking shorts. So I did a 2 inch drawing of the green shoed Big Bad Wolf, and taped him in place of the Little Red Riding Hoodie drawing,and scanned it in. 

So now I had Little Red Riding Hoodie going into the woods to Grandma's house. And the menacing Big Bad Wolf following her into the dark forbidding woods. So far so good, but what about a resolution or story ending?

Contrary to most of the Little Red Riding Hood stories I decided to give a bigger role to Grandma. I wondered what would it look like if instead of being a “victim”, what if Grandma was made of sterner stuff and decided to go on the offensive? So I wanted to see what the Grandma character would look like if she went all "Van Helsing" on the (were)Wolf. I contrasted Grandma in her pink fluffy grandmotherly robe and slippers,white hair in a bun, with a big shinny axe slung over her shoulder. The same axe that she had used to defeat the Big Bad Wolf, who she is dragging, by the tail behind her.

So I painted up the Grandma character, dragging the Big Bad Wolf behind her as she and Little Red Riding Hoodie left the scary woods behind them. I taped the three characters down in place of the previous Big Bad Wolf character, and scanned it in.

So these three panels are the result of the same watercolour experiment (used in all three scenes), along with three different cut out figures, used for three different “scenes” to tell a itty bitty story. I had a ball trying out this Little Red Riding Hood version.