100 Palettes Challenge // Palette #15 // Greetings From the Pine Barrens by @3ofpents

Today's color palette comes from a German Red Cross poster from 1914.

Are you excited? I'm excited.

It's less to do with the palette, though something about it does really appeal to me somehow.

But so let me bring you on a bit of a journey.

The other day, I was playing some classic Disney shorts for my toddler, one of them being Paul Bunyan. If you've never watched Disney's Paul Bunyan animated short, or if you haven't watched it in a while, I highly recommend it for the backgrounds alone. They're a classic example of that sort of classic painted, textured minimalist mid-century style. And as I was really looking at them, they reminded me so much of the travel posters from the 1930's and '40s. And as I was thinking about those, I just really wanted to try out the style.

So I did!

It didn't even take me that long to decide on a subject. I grew up in New Jersey and lived there for most of my life, and the thing that really pains me about cryptid fandom in the lack of love for the Jersey Devil.

For those who don't know, the Jersey Devil (not to be confused with the hockey team of the same name, which was named after it!) is a cryptid alleged to live in the NJ Pine Barrens, an area that takes up about a third of the state. One of the several stories goes that, back in the colonial era, a woman either by the name of Mother Leeds or who lived at Leeds Point, NJ, discovered she was pregnant with her thirteenth child. Devastated — possibly because her husband was terrible, possibly because it was just hard giving birth to and supporting that many children — the woman hiked to the top of a hill nearby and shouted to the sky, "Let this one be a devil!"

Months later, possibly on a dark and stormy night, the woman gives birth to her thirteenth child. It might have been a rough birth, but both the mother and child survived. However, while the midwife was tending to the baby, the mother heard her scream. The baby changed — transformed — right in front of her eyes, its face and body lengthening, its hands twisting and hardening into hooves, a tail sprouting from its hips, and leathery wings stretching out of its back.

The next scream the mother heard was the inhuman screech of her devil child right before it killed the midwife and took flight. It might have then flown through the house, killing the entire family; it might have flown up the chimney in a burst of strength that blew the house from its foundations. But either way it flew into the depths of the pine barrens where it's rumored to have been terrorizing the residents of New Jersey ever since.

They say that anyone who's spent a night in the pine barrens has a story about encountering the Jersey Devil.

So when I thought about what location I wanted to make a travel poster for, obviously my first and only answer was the NJ pine barrens, and I needed to include the Jersey Devil on the poster somewhere.

And damn I had so much fun with this! Which you can probably tell, I think this is the most detailed piece I've ever made, and I'm so proud of it. I originally planned to have the Jersey Devil be lurking amongst the trees in a more prominent position, but with the limited palette I wasn't sure I'd be able to make it look right. And I really liked the idea of it kind of photo bombing the poster.

There was a little bit of frustration trying to figure out how I wanted to do the pine needles and the texture on the ground. But it was so satisfying when I finally hit on the look I wanted that the frustration barely even registered after that. And the tree textures, damn, I was expecting to be way more frustrated by that, but it worked out so well.

I loved the gradient around the moon so much that I added another one to the ground. I meant to play around with some gradients on the text but I forgot. I probably could've added some gradients to the trees too. When I do this again (because I'm definitely doing this again), I'm absolutely going to spend more time with gradients.

But god I'm so happy with how this came out, I might just print it out for myself to hang up.