Just Keep Swimming, Er, Riding... (Housekeeping Note)

'The Prince and the Goose Girl' by Elinor Mordaunt, illustrated by Alice & Martin Provensen

See those rider's faces above? That's pretty much ours right now. (Mine might be closer to the completely freaked out horse's face...)

We are in the midst of one of those oh-so-stressful processes: a hard drive replacement. And it's kinda tricky. I've been struggling along between a limited tablet and an extremely slow-and-prone to crashing computer, desperately trying to make sure I've gotten copies of all my important files. (What is that line about "backing-up your back-up"? Insert that one here.)

It's been teetering on the edge of oblivion and doing a great job at keeping our blood pressure on the high side but, with some fortuitous help from some very kind people (aka magicians):

• we now have the replacement drive (aka: high score achieved!) 
• we now have it installed (aka: level up achieved!)
• and now we have to do some technical wizardry getting all our minions out of the old fortress intact, and into the new one, all while battling devious invisible system-gremlins... (aka: Boss Battle!)

:/ #dontfreakoutdontfreakout

I need to find my game face and put it ON.

It looks like all this will require me to 'go dark' for a short time, though I hope you won't notice. If I'm not back in time to post our regular Sunday advice from Baba Yaga, the above gremlin are to be blamed but once we have conquered, I will make sure I post it ASAP so you don't have to wait a whole other week.

Wish us luck and cross your fingers that we keep all our digit(al)s intact!

Red Riding Hood & Other Mythic Work of Beatriz Martin Vidal

Beatriz Martin Vidal is an artist and illustrator from Spain and her portfolio has many unusual and mythic paintings which once seen are hard to forget. I was, of course, immediately drawn to her retelling of Red Riding Hood and to pique your interest I'm inlcuding her captions for the RRH paintings below:

The Girl

Premonition

First Encounter

Grandma and Wolf

Coming Out The Wolf

Second Wolf

(The link takes you straight to that page in her portfolio.)

I'm only including a few of the illustrations as you really should see them on her site with her captions and amongst her other work to fully appreciate them.She has a lot of other work which is of interest to myth and fairy tale enthusiasts too so take time to browse. You won't be disappointed.

There is a Spanish version of the book available HERE.

I feel I have to include some of her other work to tempt you to go browse her galleries, in case you've already seen her Red Riding Hood series so here are just a few which caught my eye:

This is for The Goose Girl.

 

This is for a Rusalka tale.

 And this puts me in mind of The Frog King and little girls growing up (with or without their manners... as if they're in a very different sort of finishing school ;)

Coilhouse Magazine + Blog has a wonderful article on Ms. Martin Vidal which I highly recommend (lots of pretty pictures to see there too!).

Please make sure you visit her website HERE and her deviantArt page HERE (LOTS of gorgeous work here). She has a whole series for a book on birds and children too - something which always feels very connected to fairy tales for me.

"Because now you know that some birds are born with wings and other birds have to make wings by themselves. "

(Beatriz Martin Vidal from her book "On Children and Birds")

I'll leave you with this lovely tribute video to her artistry.