The island cursed by the seal woman

**AtTheShoreline** · 03-21-2019, 02:11 PM

This was my entry for the Feb '19 / March '19 Lite Challenge. The challenge was to draw map of a fairy tale. I did a map of the island with the village where the folktale of the seal woman is set. This is a tale I have heard my mother tell several times but it wasn't until I started googling that I found out it's a Faroese folktale. For those interested I found it online here.

A five sentence summary (spoiler warning): It's about a seal that takes off her seal skin to dance as a human and it gets stolen, forcing her to remain human. The person who stole her skin marries her and she lives as a human for a years. She manages to regain her skin and returns to the sea. Her human husband later kills two of her seal pups and her seal husband despite her warning. She curses the village so that people will die until there are so many of them that they can reach around the whole island if they link hands.

For the style I was heavily influenced by the Bayeux Tapestry, especially for the animals in the border.

Map drawn by hand on an A4. In Gimp I added the background paper, changed the ink color slightly and added some imperfection to the ink with a mask.