Fern and The Moon Rabbit

October 2017 I participated in a challenge called Inktober. It's a challenge created by Jake Parker that has grown tremendously over the last few years and more and more artists gather online to show of their ink drawings everyday through the month. I decided to take on this list and go all out by creating a story connected by all of these words, stringed together to finally form a story at the end. It might seem like a random story at times, mostly because I had to draw one drawing everyday and didn't have time to plan out the story from beginning to end before I started.

After the first day I quickly noticed that the drawings needed more context, that is when I added the poems. Something else to connect them than just drawings. I love the old fairy tale children's stories with poems and rhymes, so now every image had to be accompanied with 4 lines of text. This is when I realised I would love to print this as a small book. Even though its silly, rough and only created over a month, I wanted it on paper. Maybe just as a pat on the back to myself for completing the challenge, or maybe to show other people that your work doesn't have to be perfect to justify completing it and having a product at the end!

The story is simple yet very unrefined. Imagine having to come up with a chapter of a book every single day but by following certain themes and somehow have it look like a coherent story at the end. Well that is what it was like. I managed to plan some days in advance but some days I had to wing it and take some liberties with the prompts. I'm not happy with some of my drawings, but I think that is ok and good. I had to learn to swallow the urge to redraw and just finish. I do have my favourites though, that turned out better than expected.

Type: Poems & illustrations

Series: One shot

Pages: 31 illustrations

Genre: Fantasy

Creators: Dina Norlund

Age group: All ages

Format: Softcover

THE STORY

The story is about a young troll called Fern that embarks on a quest to revive and return the moon to the night sky. But there to complete her urgent task she needs to travel through some unforgiving places and fight some horrid creatures. She'll meet poisonous mountain frogs, a long underwater snake, a gigantic wyvern and other mythical creatures! Some will aid her, other will aim to stop her, and some that plan to steal the moon for their own selfish reasons.

MYTH AND FOLKLORE

The story was based (in the beginning) in Norway and roughly based on the Norwegian folklore about trolls. But it has since evolved to not only include Norse but also other mythologies like Greek and Chinese. Roughly inspired and probably not very accurate, but inspired non the less.