Folktale Week 2025 - A Making Of

“The folktale is the primer of the picture-language of the soul.” -Joseph Campbell

Hello,

It’s Lea again! I am back with a new illustration challenge called Folktale Week. Each day was a prompt for an illustration and I tried my best to string the prompts into a story. Doing one illustration per day for a week was certainly a challenge, but I really felt myself improve day after day.

Here was the list of the prompts, it’s a challenge that originated from an instagram user called @Folktale Week.

I really love the spookiness set up by the prompts, and the clear narration timeline, from Night to Dawn. So I started sketching out all the sketches for the week. The Story I had in mind was about a Young Boy called Paul, and his dog Poppy. Paul took Poppy out for an adventure into the darkest hours in the night. He also borrowed Grandma’s Magical book of charms. ( yes, grandma is a witch) and trials and tribulations follow. From a dark and mysterious cave, where Paul’s Echo calls back, to rain falling towards the sky, and a shift of gravity, Paul will try to fix the day with a charm from the magic book, but unfortunately creates a storm instead, which dies down just before Dawn.

My rough outline for the entire week

The story is a bit outstretched I know, but I really fell in love with Paul and Poppy throughout the week, and I had a really nice time coming back to them every evening to complete the daily illustrations.

Here is all the final illustrations from the week, Looking back at it, I wished I had sticked to a more coherent limited color pallette to be shared across all the panels, but I still really enjoy them individually.

If you are curious, here is the video recording of my entire week of illustrating ( which took around 17 hours according to Procreate).

And That’s all folks ! I really enjoyed this challenge, I think making one illustration a day is a crazy challenge ( which is why I lasted only 4 days this inktober) but for just 1 week was not too bad :)

Anyway let me know what you think! Are you participating in any upcoming Art challenge? And don’t hesitate to reach out! I am always looking to connect with fellow artists & illustrators to share the joys and sorrows of creating pretty pictures from our heads.

See you soon

Lea