First time visitors: You are welcome to join us above with Volume 2, Queen of Swans, or start with Volume 1: “Red Riding Hood” here.  There is no correct path, only a  long, hopefully fun one 🙂

Continuing Readers:  If you did not catch up on last week’s rather long update, you may wish to do so first 🙂  before proceeding below the cut.   Otherwise, this week I sort of sat down and did a bit of drawing.  There were two sketches that came out — one that I decided to ink by hand , rescan in blue and then re-ink to fix some issues.   The second sketch I’ll paint /save for another time.  This week’s is Elisa and her six bros. Yep.  And the story that came to mind after I started drawing it was pretty entertaining!

Initially the purpose of this exercise was just to try to flesh out the six brothers in my mind. We established two names in last week’s installment and two somewhat distinct personalities. The other four brothers hadn’t really any particular focus in my mind until I started to doodle them on paper.  I wanted six different enough personalities more or less so experimented a little with their design. (If you know your anime stereotypes, I think it’s obvious which three are the older brothers but I’ll let you guess. ha!).

 The unintended part of this process was cross-dressing Elisa.  Somewhere in the transition of Elisa from Wild Swans/Six Swans to the “what next” she had to lose her hair.  This seemed like a natural thing to happen at this point. In addition, this scene below became one in which she also had to dress as a boy.  (Why not? It’s a common trope.)  In any case after drawing the below, some text came to mind. You can read the text here.