In 2024, I won a VACMA grant to create a series of pieces of illustrative artwork on North East Scotland Folklore.
Alison Gross is a Scottish ballad, first recorded by Anna Gordon Brown, a female folklorist and musician from Aberdeen, Scotland.
I like the Woodbine & Ivy Band's rendition, which you can find here:
https://folkpolicerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/the-woodbine-ivy-band
It tells the story of a (huge) witch- the 'ugliest witch in the North country', who seeks to woo the narrator into being her lover.
My task is to take scenes of this ballad, illustrate, and turn them into short vignette animations showing limited movement, kind of like the animatronics that you might find in a museum/ narrative theme park attraction.
When the narrator rejects Alison Gross' advances, she casts a spell to turn him into a 'worm' (the old English word for dragon). Celtic dragons were a bit different from the dragons that we commonly think of today. They tended to be long and thin, a bit like a snake.
The story ends when the Queen of Elphame happens upon our narrator, takes pity on him, and decides to turn him back into his original form.