Character Design Challenge: The Witch

At least, she's done! You voted for me drawing a witch and her familiar, and here she is! It took me a little while - both due to real life deciding to be particularly awful during January and February, and due to the fact that a little voice in my head said "hey what if you did an illustration that looks kind of like a tarot card for this??" and I heard myself go "what a good idea". >.>

I decided that instead of the classic pointy hat, black cat and broom, I would reach for a more Scandinavian style witch. Which is how she ended up wearing an outfit that mixes bits of Swedish national/regional costume and the Norwegian bunad. They're based on the clothing of the rural population, and tend to consist of a blouse, a bodice, a heavy wool skirt and sometimes an apron. I decided to forego the traditional headscarf.

She is also wearing a big brooch/crest with an ellakors on it - an "elf cross", a cross with four equal limbs, which in Swedish folk-magic is used as a ward against elves and other unpleasantness.

And of course, all good witches have a familiar - and rather than the regular cat, I gave her a skvader.

The skvader is my favourite Swedish cryptid. It's a mix of a hare and a wood-grouse, first recorded in 1974 by a hunter in northern Sweden who liked to tell tall tales of his hunts. In the 1920s, actual taxidermied examples were made and put up for display at the Museum of Biology in Stockholm - I've seen them in person, back on a school trip in middle school.

I went with the skvader both because I like them, and because they are a gesture to the bjära, or troll-hare. Which were little stitchling artificial creatures, almost like humonculi, that witches made from hair, nail and woodshavings, and then sent out to steal milk from the cows at the neighbouring farms.


Thank you to everyone who voted in the last character design poll! And thank you to all patrons, who support me spending hours digging up photo-references of elf-crosses and trying to find instructions for how to wear regional folk-costumes and squinting at examples of century-old taxidermy as I invent something by smashing all those bits together.

I wouldn't be able to do this without that support. <3