The Hedgehog and the Rabbit

The Story Behind The Story

"The Hedgehog and The Rabbit" features an admittedly heavy-handed message. The reason for this has a lot to do with its initial purpose.

In early 1992, I was utterly heart-broken. My fiancée had broken off our engagement some weeks ago and I was desperately looking for companionship. A very nice woman was, however, rejecting my advances, stating that she and I were just too different.

Instead of winning her over with verbal arguments, I decided to write, draw and paint the Fable of the Hedgehog and The Rabbit. I made two color copies, bound them into little booklets and gave her one of them. The second copy was used by a friend who was in a similar situation, with a different girl in a different town, with a similar purpose.

We were both shot down immediately, mercilessly and deservedly. It was a romantic thought, but it takes much more than a colorful booklet with a trite moral to turn friendships into relationships.

The original watercolored drawings went into a folder, which disappeared in a drawer, where I rediscovered them some weeks back. It made me smile. Hopefully it will make you smile as well.

If you are thinking of giving somebody a print-out of the Fable in order to win over their heart, I'd strongly advise against it.

How It Was Done

The Fable of the Hedgehog and The Rabbit was created mostly by hand, at a time where I didn't own a computer.

Following a dozen character sketches of the hedgehog and the rabbit, I proceeded to pencil the ten pages of the Fable. After inking them (india ink, pen), I scanned them in with a 300 dpi scanner from the Mac-based DTP system at the university. On the Mac, I added the lettering, printed the results out and photocopied them onto cardboard. The copies were colored using water-soluble color pencils. Skies and big surfaces were then moistened with a a water-soaked brush.

The present version was scanned in 2002 from the water-colored drawings (I hesitate to call them "originals", considering all the interim steps).

In the end, the hardest work ended up the creation of the High-Bandwidth Frames version of the tale.