Ella Larson is a writer and illustrator... who will apparently write her bio later. Ah well. Guess you can enjoy the mystery for now...
Illustrations
Serpentin Vert
My big project spring 2025 was taking one of my favorite fairy tales -- "Serpentin Vert" by Madame d'Aulnoy -- and illustrating six scenes.
It's a wild story -- there's an ugly curse, then a Cupid and Psyche section where "Cupid"/"Beast" is a dragon, a doll-puppet war, a grove of people-transformed-into-animals, and then a whole impossible tasks section. I love it so much.
I actually did a quick (long) rewrite of the story to go with this, and changed a few things along the way. I still need to go back to the story and color the last 5 with watercolor, but that's a project for another day. I gave the pieces French names in reference to the story's origin, and to be pretentious.
Fairy Tale Illustrations
These are a series of illustrations I made for several fairy and folk tales. I tried to stick to a more graphic, flat language for maximum impact and simplicity, and went with a tritone color scheme for each to emphasize a sort of "poster" quality.
Grey Matters Journal
I worked with the neuroscience magazine Grey Matters Journal at Vassar College in order to create illustrations for an article on fear and exposure therapy -- Facing Our Fears: Extinguishing Conditioned Fears with Exposure Therapy by Alex Tansey.
To create the illustrations, I went back and forth with Alex and sometimes the editors and other artists to make a series of images representing fear and how it transforms our perceptions. Alex liked the idea of focusing on spiders, a common and visceral fear, so I drew many many spiders for the piece, both scary and not-so-scary. Since she also talked about the "Little Albert" experiments, we used that example to create a diagram explaining how conditioning influences our reactions.
I had so much fun with this, both getting feedback from the author, and making a bunch of really disgusting spiders, which was much more fun than it should have been.
