This story is more widely known as “Sleeping Beauty”.
In the story, an invitation is lost in transit and the unintentionally-uninvited Witch arrives to Rose’s christening anyway. This image illustrates the moment the Witch casts her spell of deep sleep on the child while the celebrating party looks on.
When designing this piece, my intention was to call upon the children’s book design of the Art Nouveau era and the Eastern European aesthetic of the 1800s. I was thinking specifically of Alphonse Mucha, tinged with the character development quality of the children’s book illustrator Maxfield Parrish. Another big influence of mine is the gorgeous work of the English book illustrator, Arthur Rackham (1867-1939).
The drawing was answering a call for entries in John Schindehette’s The Art Order publication around 2016. Mr. Schindehette was the art director of Wizards of the Coast and Magic The Gathering card game for nearly a decade before starting out on his own enterprise.