Angela Carter's Folio Society - The Company of Wolves

The Company of Wolves is originated around the story of Red Riding Hood.  These other Red Riding Hood illustrations I discovered are very interesting and inspiring as to what atmosphere can be created through composition, colour and media's are used.

From the research I took inspiration and created a few rough design ideas along the same idea of having the wolves eyes towering over Red Riding Hood.

From deciding upon the idea of the illustration, I picked apart the components to develop.

I created this tree through blowing ink using a straw

The drapery of Red's gown is very important:

Then I started to create quality components for the actual Company of Wolves illustration:

The background

The wolves eyes and nose

The twining trees leaving the shape of the wolves eyes and nose

The drapery of Red Riding Hood's hooded coat

This first design shows Red at quite a height, I like seeing the detail that I have painted into Red's drapery.  However, she doesn't seem to be towered over by the forest and the top of her hood seems to be interfering too close to the nose and start of the trees branches.

This is slightly better, with Red that little bit smaller it gives a nice space between her hood and the forest and wolves nose.  However, it could do with some more shrinking to create more suspense.

This Red Riding Hood is just too small, she definitely is towered over by the forest but when this is printed out at the correct size it doesn't show her enough and she needs to stand out a bit more as the illustration and story is about her relationship with the wolf.

Page 129

"The eyes of wolves shine like candle flames, yellowish, reddish ... the pupils of their eyes flatten on darkness"

This is my chosen designed illustration.  The size of Red Riding Hood is perfect for the atmosphere I am creating. It keeps in well with the series of two other illustrations with the large and small items arranged together, colour palette, as well as having the potential to be taken as possibly quite sexual, having Red entering a dangerous forest.

These designs may seem quite like fantasy illustration but that is the style that I am going for to reflect the origin of Angela Carter's inspiration.  It is quite a Gothic fantasy style and structure to the story, so to truly reflect Carter's dark underline to these original fairy tales I needed the illustration to reflect this.