The Ugly Duckling - a new way to tell fairy tales.
This has been my most challenging project to date, and it started as my thesis project for my MA Illustration. I wanted to find a new way to tell classic fairy tales, in their original print versions (meaning the first printed versions of these tales) and move them away from the cookie-cutter anaesthetised versions.
After a lot of research I finally settled on "The Ugly Duckling" by Hans Christian Andersen. Reading it again made me realise how important this story is to this day, it plays on motifs that are still current issues, such as feeling out of place, bullying, feeling inadequate in society or even racism - depending on the reader's point of view.
To find a new spin on classic stories, stories that depend on the storyteller, the written or spoken word, I decided that I would take away the text element altogether. In other words, I would tell the tale via images only. Rely only on illustrations.
This is the journey I took, I hope you enjoy it!
To begin the actual storyboarding process, I divided the fairy tale into “actions,” whenever something of importance happened, that merited a storyboard frame, it would be marked as a board in the sketchbook.
Testing digital styles and colours.
An interesting part of the process was trying to figure out how to convey the conversations the characters had only through images.
Final digital style.
In other versions of the story, the moment where the duckling sees himself as a swan is greatly underwhelming. For these frames I wanted to give the duckling the importance he deserved, the colours are simple and clean, and he is presented in a more central manner to mark the importance of this event: he bows his head in sacrifice, and sees his true self reflected in the water
