Tuesday 24 February 2009

The Queens of the Heart, part three - The Queen of the Cold

Like all the Queens of the Heart, the Queen of the Cold began life as one of the four Jewish "angels of prostitution", but early influences on the Queen of the Cold also include Hans Christian Anderson's "Snow Queen", the fairytale of "Snow White and Rose Red", and Tove Jansson's "Lady of the Cold" from her book Moominland Midwinter, possibly my favourite of the Moomintroll books. In the "Snow Queen" too many kisses from the Queen will kill you, while Jansson's Lady of the Cold can kill you just by looking at you.

I imagine my Queen of the Cold as beautiful and seductive but ulitimately treacherous. While she may enjoy physical pleasure (it's not like she's frigid) she is the goddess of sexual and emotional detachment, so she will always be a cold lover and cannot make the connection between physical and emotional intimacy... she's something like an emotional void. Her domain is a barren icey wasteland - The Cold - and the gods that live there are the spirits of Arctic beasts and birds, as well as spirits of ice, snowflakes, and maybe even Arctic atmospheric phenomena like the Aurora.

She's the most human-looking of the Queens simply because I wanted some of my gods to look a bit more human, but since I did this drawing I've altered it so that her crown is now actually crystalline icey spikes growing out of her head, and her skin has little icey cracks all over it, so hopefully she looks a little more interesting. I'm pretty conflicted as to what her skin/hair colour combination should be... Should I go for blue skin and white hair? White and blue? White and blonde? Blue and blonde? White all over? Aaaaarrrrr......!!! I drive myself crazy with this shizzle.

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