the dragon with seven heads

Here's another larger ink drawing, another illustration of Italo Calvino's version of the Italian Folktale "The Dragon with Seven Heads." After my Little Red Riding Hood illustration, I went back to this favorite of mine, continuing to work with the silhouettes. This one shows more of my own style than the Red Riding Hood one, and I'm happy with how it turned out.

Here's what I said about the folktale last time:

The image of a woman with a knife, preparing to cut off the tongue of a dragon, came from "The Dragon with Seven Heads," an Italian folktale I read in Italo Calvino's collection of Italian fairytales. The gist of the story is that, after a fisherman kills a talking magical fish (which had previously help him find a bunch of non-magical fish to catch and eat) and serves it to his family, his wife, horse, and dog, each have triplets. The eldest of the human triplets travels into the world with his horse, sword, and magical talking dog, where he decides to rescue a princess from a seven-headed dragon, thereby winning her hand. In order to prove that he killed the dragon, he has the princess collect the seven tongues in her handkerchief, which sets up the rest of the story.