The Day Boy and the Night Girl: February/March 2019 Lite Challenge Entry

[rdanhenry]

The challenge was to map a fairy tale. I chose George MacDonald's "The Day Boy and the Night Girl", probably the best of his fairy tales. Certainly, it is the only one which I was able to describe the basic premise of from memory thirty years later. I reread to get the necessary details for the challenge, of course, but in broad strokes, it is the tale of a witch who has the mind of a mad scientist. She's driven by curiosity, and the title characters are two children she raises, the boy always surrounded by brightness and the girl living with nothing but the light of a dim lamp, the boy conditioned to sleep through the night and the girl to sleep through the day. Of course, they do manage to meet and the experiment gets out of the witch's hands at that point.

This was both the first map I made in Krita and the first map on which I used a tablet. The map suffered for my learning my tools, but making the map got me started with them. The process was more about experimentation than the product. My original idea was to have the boy and girl drawn as figures on either side of the map, but I hadn't the time and they probably wouldn't have looked good. Perhaps someday I'll remake this map as originally envisioned...