What is folktale week?

Every year in late November, illustrators post their own original stories, or retellings of old folktales, each day for a week. There is a different prompt word for each day and it’s fun to see how people use those prompts differently. It’s mostly an Instagram event but I haven’t been active on Meta platforms for a while so I posted to Bluesky. There’s been a huge surge in the kidlit community there since the US election and it’s a really nice place to hang out online.

Last year I took part in folktale week for the first time; I wrote and illustrated a Greek myth style story called The Boy and The Swan. I’ve titled this year’s story Coin Operated Fun. It’s still got a bit of a tragic twist, but in more of a twilight zone / outer limits style. I hope it’s got a bit of humour too. Read on for the full story and then some notes and sketches on how it developed.

Coin Operated Fun

The children ride through the mist on their stolen steel chariot.

From the gate, a supermarket wizard watches, muttering dark magics.
He is known by many names;
The Trolley Whisperer,
Keeper Of The Carts,
King Of The Carpark,
Steve.

Blighted, the children sleep as the wizard takes back his property.
The damage will need to be paid for.

Let us follow the trail to learn their fate…

In the depths of the wizard’s concrete kingdom, we see the chariot restored and returned.
But where are the children?

Can it be?
The children’s flesh and bone made solid by the wizard’s curse.
Unmoving, they watch as parents insert coins for toddlers to frolic. Slowly repaying the children’s debt.

One day, they might play again beneath the blossom of the forest. But not today.
If you should see them on your travels, perhaps insert a coin to quicken their freedom.
Every little helps.

The Inspiration

I had the idea for this story a couple of months ago. I was looking through some old sketchbooks and saw this pencil sketch from a few years ago. When my daughter still napped I would often find myself trapped in the car waiting for her to wake up. So this is the view through my windscreen in a supermarket carpark one Wednesday lunchtime.

The little figures in the background caught my eye (I think they are Ben and Holly, riding on a ladybird.) They looked as though they were aware, and maybe watching for a good moment to make a run for it. I thought a story about coin operated toddler rides coming alive might be good for folktale week.

Before the prompts were released, I was thinking along the lines of a king and queen cursed by a wizard to be statues. Their form changed to match the time they were in over hundreds of years, until the present day, when they are a toddler ride. I thought the story would see them finally escape the curse. That’s when I made the “I’m joining folktale week” poster.

When the prompts were released (Mist, Gate, Blight, Trail, Depth, Bone, Blossom) and I actually tried to plan a coherent story, it didn’t really come together. I was trying to tell it through the eyes of a toddler who visits the supermarket each week and sees things he doesn’t quite understand. On the last visit the ride is gone and we the readers know the couple are now free. But that’s a lot of time travelling, curse wielding backstory to subtly imply in a repeated drawing of a supermarket carpark!

When I got the idea of the main characters being children, and the curse was a punishment for joy riding on a trolley, then it all came together quite quickly.

Developing the Story

These were my initial thumbnails after I had the story worked out. Some stayed the same in the final, some changed a bit.

A key thing I wanted to achieve was to have their final situation mirror the start as much as possible. So I had to design the toddler ride and their trolley joy ride at the same time and match positions and details. I wanted it to feel like they brought this on themselves through their actions.

On this overlay you can see that I matched their body positions pretty well. I just made them a little stiffer, with chunkier, rounder edges in the toddler ride version. The trolley became a horse, the boy’s cap became a crown, the girl’s phone became a sword. I had her holding a phone up for a couple of reasons. I wanted a dynamic pose for the ride, I wanted her to be holding something that could be dropped in the trail illo. I also wanted to mirror the music being played. I like to think the ride even plays the same tune they were listening to at the start, just to make it extra tragic.

Obviously their expressions were actual joy at the start and then I kept them smiling but in a fixed grimace instead. One of the things that made this story work so well is just how creepy these rides actually are! I can fully believe some of them might have indebted souls trapped inside:

(If you’ve never listened to the John Finnemore slightly off Disney Characters sketch then you’re in for a treat.)

Final Illustrations

For The Boy and the Swan last year I used photos of faded tattoos on weathered skin to develop the colour palette, and I wanted to do something similar here. So I tried to use colours based on the old vintage rides. All my attempts were horrible though!

Not only were the colours themselves hideous, there were just too many of them. In the end, I developed the colour palette from working on the first illustration in the forest. I found this one tricky at first because trees are my illustration nemesis. But then I realised it’s mostly the leaves I hate to draw so I just made the trees tall and concentrated on their trunks. Problem solved. I also have a love/hate relationship with green in illustrations. After lots of attempts to use green here, I just went with yellow and blue instead. You can mix them in your retinas and make green yourself :)

The opening image sets up a lot for later. Their posture and position as I showed above. But it also needed music to mirror that of the toddler ride, blossom, as a call back at the end, and the gate in the background, for the next prompt. I also forgot to add any mist until just before I went to post this illo online! Looks good though, right? That mist really adds something to the image.

I made quite a few tweaks as I went along from day to day, and even just before writing this post. With the short timescale from prompts being released to the event starting, there isn’t really time to fully revise beforehand. As I went to post the Blight image, I realised I’d altered the text to talk about the damage being paid for, but there was no damage to be seen! so I quickly changed it.

The wide shot of the carpark I changed after posting. I wanted to add the wizard into the scene and fade the children-as-toddler-ride into the background a bit, so they are more of a second read.

Word Play

The story was untitled until halfway through the week. I like Coin Operated Fun because it refers to both the ride and the trolley. I also hope some of you (those of you in the UK at least) noticed that the final line, every little helps, is the slogan for Tesco (A supermarket chain here). For a little while I wanted to hide a different supermarket slogan into the text of each day but all the others are things like “eat better for less”, or “spend a little, live a lot” so it would have been very clunky and obvious!

And that’s a wrap! See you next November for another folktale week adventure. Though I will still be here, writing about illustration stuff, for the rest of the year. So, if you’re not already subscribed, do pop your email address in the box. (No ads, no spam, you can unsubscribe at any time, always free. I send a post out around once a month on average.)

Also, if you took part and have a roundup of your folktale work this year, do put a link to it in the comments. I’d love to read them!