Based on The Reluctant Bride 1866 by Auguste Toulmouche✨ a friend of mine suggested this prompt, and really popped off with this concept. The saddest part sleeping beauty is when her godmother‘s take her to the castle and prepare her to be a princess. They try to reassure her but she has just been stripped of her identity and agency. She never wanted to be a princess. So I have Flora, giving her a reassuring kiss on the forehead, Fauna imagining out loud what it would be like to be a princess, and Merryweather is the only one who actually sees Briar Rose’s sorrows and inner turmoil. I also added another master copy as a tapestry, (an illustration of Maleficent by Eyvind Earle) and it hangs quite literally over Aurora and adds an extra layer of foreboding.🖤 I stayed up till four in the morning working on this.🤠😂 It took me 13 hours total to finish it.
Since there're complaints that using a Seven Dwarfs analog for Asha’s friend group reduced them to props because there isn't enough screen time to develop all of them, would three friends based on the Three Good Fairies have worked better?
Dahlia is based on Doc, but she works as a Flora analog too as a matronly figure in red who has the ideas and tries to keep order. She just needs a ditzy sweetheart in green and an aggressive pessimist in blue (fulfilling Gabo’s role, I guess) to mediate. As for their names, the themes are right there: One named after a plant (also applies to Dahlia), one named after an animal, and the last named after something in the sky.
And before anyone complains about too many girls, all three don't have to be girls. Make the Fauna and the Merryweather male, then you have an equal gender balance with Asha and Dahlia.
Ok!! Still have a couple of Disney Villain Backstories to do but thought I'd get started on the Godmothers Backstories!
So here's Flora Fauna and Merryweather:
They are Half fairies, the children of a fairy with a human man. They thus have fairy powers but still age, though much much more slowly than humans
Raised in the Fairy Court by their mother, the fairy Tranquility, who was a favored companion of the Fairy Queen Titania, and had power over Dreams, specifically prophetic ones.
She was killed by the Dark Fairy Carabosse, and the three orphaned half fairies were made Ladies in Waiting to Titania
They are several hundred years older then Maleficent, who is the niece of Queen Titania
Due to their status in the Fairy Court they later became the royal caretakers of young Stefan, who was a human foundling raised in the Court as a foster child of the King and Queen
They helped him defeat Maleficent when he revealed her involvement with the Dark Arts, taught to her by the Dark Fairy Carabosse
This adventure earned Stefan his title of King when he wed the Princess Leah of Perceforet, and the fairies the titles of The Three Good Fairies, and they became the official Fairy Godmothers of his future children as well
They will eventually be asked to train future royal children by Aurora when she becomes the new Fairy Queen, in order to help find the child prophesied to help defeat the First Evil of the Everrealm
(Tranquility the Fairy of Dreams was a cut concept for one of the fairies that I thought sounded cool, so I brought her in)
I need the xianle trio as the fairy godmothers in sleeping beauty. Feng xin and Mu Qing being flora and merriweather because they’re always fighting, and Xie Lian being Fauna because they aren’t good at cooking.
✨🌹 Yesterday marked the 65th anniversary of Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty”. It turned out to be the last animated fairy tale produced during Walt Disney’s lifetime. I decided to commemorate the movie’s anniversary with a drawing of Princess Aurora as Briar Rose. What I find most challenging about drawing Aurora is the need to faithfully incorporate the design elements crafted by her lead animator Marc Davis, one of Disney’s Nine Old Men. ✨✨
Abundant adventures await you here in Swynlake! Tales of magic, friendship, and mystery. What dreams will you make come true?
Mowgli Chopra (Mowgli, The Jungle Book) - Swynlake means stability, your father insists, but you wonder if what you had before was really all that bad. The animals were your friends! How're you meant to make people friends!?
Tink Bell (Tinkerbell, Peter Pan) - A return to one’s hometown isn’t always a good thing, but it isn’t always a bad thing either. A bad breakup brings home to your Hollow, to the town next to it, and to the club you own in that town. Swynlake is home and maybe just the thing you need after living abroad.
Cruella De Vil (Cruella De Vil, 101 Dalmations) - The curl in your lips, the ice in your stare, all innocent folks had better beware... you’ll stop at nothing to make your art, even if it means spilling a bit of Magick blood. It’s all in the name of fashion, darling.
Annette Elizabeth Grant (Lady, Lady And The Tramp) - What is this, some Edwardian era story? Sent away to your auntie's (as a grown woman you might add!) just because your parents didn't approve of your romance, will you be able to make the best of being in Swynlake?
Cheshire Fields (The Cheshire Cat) - You're always smiling but is that always a good thing? One can never tell if it's kindly or mischievous, or what secrets the town's favorite invisible barista is hiding...
Fauna Greenleaf (Fauna, Sleeping Beauty) - You've always had one foot in two worlds and now you've chosen to lean into one more than the other. Will taking the leap prove worth it?