I’ve got a cover for you!Username: elfstar89
Main Image:
Extra Images: N/A
What did you use to make it?: PS Elements 6.0, the best I've got, shy of pencil and paper, which would lack the colored glory of it
Additional Comments: Oh, boy, are there a lot, because this picture has been slathered in a lot of meanings for me! First off, I'm 1/4 Slavic, so since I was inspired by the Baba Yaga-based pretty and my own heritage as early as elementary school, here goes~
The very darkest fairy tales I heard or read as a kid weren't Grimm's Fairy Tales, even the more...ahhh...unadulterated versions. The darkest stuff I read is Slavic fairy tales, the only genre of fairy tales I know of in which the hero can be clinically dead and then mutilated before being resurrected via magic, where the undead and other anthropomorphic personifications of death are stock characters, and where the entire body of oral and literary tradition is either very fluffy or very depressing. I'm also a sucker for the Russian and Czech composers. For the dedicated student of Slavic folklore (or just the curious-minded), I included skeletal elements; forest elements; the night (associated with death, darkness, and evil in Slavic tales); the motif of white Day, Red sun, and Black night; the Waters of Life and Death; Baba Yaga's mortar and pestle; and the sack used to kidnap Death and make everyone immortal until Death was granted freedom. Aside from that, the design is what I think of when I think of a book of Slavic fairy tales.
The title, "Baba's Tales from Beyond the Gates" is pretty multilayered in meaning: my Czechoslovak grandmother (who in Russian would be my babushka or baba, in Old Slavic) has always encouraged my interest in Slavic Europe, literature, and the arts; Baba Yaga is one of the few remaining characters from Slavic mythology to still be in Slavic fairy tales; "the Gates" here refers to the Gates of the Otherworld/Underworld, a metaphor for the realm of Death, and a hearkening back to one of Baba Yaga's theorized original jobs: Gatekeeper to the Afterlife and the World of the Supernatural.
Scary stories don't always have to be exceptionally gory or creepy; some of the most terrifying moments are moments when you're sitting alone in a dark room with just enough light to see around you, but not enough to comfortingly construe your true surroundings, when you're reading a book that has a pretty dark tone and your mind's doing the real leg work. I have a lot of phobias and have learned coping mechanisms, but it's weird...when I put into poetic language what frightens me, everyone else gets scared, too, even when they would never normally be frightened by that stuff. I usually try to think of it as me putting into words how mankind's primal and most common fears work on us.
Aside from that...what I expected to be a 2 hour project turned into a 4 hour project, since I was almost finished when I encountered a problem known as Internet Explorer on my laptop and had to force-shut down my lappy--before I realized that the original file hadn't saved properly!
