When I was designing characters for Calling All Heroes, I was excited to find that one of them would be a Fairy. Regardless of whether I had to “turn it evil,” I was eager to have an excuse to draw one of the Fae.
Fairies have always been part of my personal lore. As a child, I was fascinated by the idea of them, and would build tiny homes for them out of acorn caps, patches of moss, and twigs. These homes often turned into little towns, and I made offerings of small berries and such for the local Fae.
I was never as drawn to fairies like Tinkerbell, however, as I was to the true Fae – the wild, untamed, fierce, and sometimes cruel Little People of the British Isles. Traditions regarding them were handed down through the Irish side of my family, I guess, and I latched onto the idea of Fae much more than fairies. I didn’t like the cute pastel ones – I liked the ones that looked like tiny delicate savages.
I recall being fascinated by the story of the Cottingley Fairies – a series of hoax (?) photographs of fairies taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, two young cousins living in Cottingley, England. One of the young women later admitted that most of the photographs had indeed been faked, but maintained until death that the fifth image was genuine.
I wondered if I would somehow, someday capture a fairy on film, and I think this actually fueled my brief teenage interest in film photography. I also drew images of fairies and “classified” them, like a field biologist taxonomizing animals, and wrote my imagined notes about each type of fairy in a notebook. That notebook is now long lost, but gosh I wish I still had it.
Since then, I have lived through some pretty wild accidents and dangerous situations, and I maintain that my miraculous survivals are at least an indirect result of my youthful offerings to the Fae. They say that fairies may seem fickle, but their memory is long – they are not quick to forget a good deed…or a bad one.
Whether fairies are real or not, the Fairy does exist in Calling All Heroes, and I had a lot of fun illustrating it. Here it is presented in its normal form, and then its Forest variation. I have to commend OgreWare on this one – they really knocked it out of the park in terms of coloring in all those tiny details. I feel a little guilty leaving so much fine filigree in there, but I do love the end results!
~Julian