“Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire,
I do wander everywhere,
Swifter than the moon’s sphere;
And I serve the fairy queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green.
The cowslips tall her pensioners be:
In their gold coats spots you see;
Those be rubies, fairy favours,
In those freckles live their savours:
I must go seek some dewdrops here
And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.
Farewell, thou lob of spirits; I’ll be gone:
Our queen and all our elves come here anon.”
—A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare
This week, in portrait number thirteen of The People of Light and Shadow series exploring the characters and creatures of fairytale and folklore, we present “The Pixie” as portrayed by Kristen McCabe.
Like several other creatures in The People of Light and Shadow series, pixies’ original roots are somewhat ambiguous, though they are primarily associated with Britain and Celtic lore, and the regions of Cornwall and Devon in particular where, according to their Wikipedia article, they were taken very seriously. They are usually depicted as diminutive, playful sprites with a childlike wonder, though they can also be jealous or thoughtlessly cruel in their games. In the last two hundred years (at the very least), many artists have rendered them with the wings of butterflies or dragonflies. The most recognizable today is Tinker Bell from J. M. Barrie’s 1904 play Peter Pan, and all the adaptations that followed it. The diminutive Tinker Bell trails “pixie dust” as she flies, and at Disneyland and in her contemporary animated series she lives in Pixie Hollow. She is doubtless the inspiration for many of the modern pixie and fairy looks of today.
The Pixie: Kristen McCabe
“She was a princess with the strength of a warrior.”
Actor Kristen McCabe came to The People of Light and Shadow project by way of makeup artist Rose Nobs. Rose and Kristen had discussed creating a fairy look in the past, so when I asked Rose if she’d like to be part of the project,* Rose agreed and said she knew someone who would be perfect for it. The three of us met up in the late summer during the planning stages for the project and discussed ideas for a fairy princess that have now come to pass.
Don’t let anyone ever dull your sparkle.
I am passionate that you can love pink and be sparkly and girly and still be as strong as steel. Femininity and strength are not mutually exclusive.
Kristen McCabe
* In this series, Rose Nobs has thus far also done makeup for “The Merrow” and “The Hidden One, Hel.” Thanks a million to Rose for her fantastic work and for bringing Kristen as a subject to create this pixie princess.
Photography
We shot two looks for Kristen’s pixie. In the first, Kristen wore a blue costume against a brown fine art background. We used a crystal ball and draped some gray fabric to create a fairytale princess/enchantress look, to which I later intended to add butterfly wings. Something about this look seemed a little more somber and subdued than what we had intended, though. Our intent had been to make something a little more vibrant—one of the people of light rather than shadow.
We decided to change the look. I wanted to try the blue, hand-painted canvas background we painted during the summer of 2020. Kristen showed off a pink corset she had brought, which seemed like it might complement the blue very well. We switched the background and tried that look, and the bold contrast between the blue and the pink won us over.
Our camera settings for this session were 85 mm, f/8, ISO 200, 1/200 sec. Thanks as always to Elizabeth MacDougald for her assistance with the session.
Editing
In reviewing the blue/pink images, I saw some real potential in a couple in which Kristen looks like she’s about to take flight.
Week 1: I decided on one of the “taking flight” looks and made an image that looked like the subject was lifting off. I merged two of those images in order to create the best pose and then added clouds and sky effects and flattened out the highlights and shadows on the image so that it looked a little more like a painting. After all that, I wasn’t sure whether I was happy with it or whether it was the right choice for the series and thought about choosing a different image.
Week 2: Looking through the images again the next week, I liked the “taking flight” ones again. I was having a hard time figuring out what should be in the image, whether I should do clouds or butterfly wings, or what. I considered giving the fairy those butterfly wings, but then decided against this, as we already covered this ground with “The Aziza Fairy,” and if I were to add butterfly wings, I’d want to shoot them myself, and butterflies are scarce at the moment. I did find dragonfly wings, however, and this provided an opportunity to depict a classic Tinker Bell type pixie, which aligned very well with the costume Kristen had chosen.
Mistakes: I had done enough work on the image that the file was becoming unwieldy. After a careful look over my image, I decided to flatten all those layers in Photoshop and start working from a new background layer that combined all my previous work… only I had missed some small but important problems and had to go back and fix rough spots several times. Lesson learned.
I spent a good deal of time working on subtle shadows in the image and blending areas of light and shadow. The image needed something else though, some kind of framing element or texture. The clouds didn’t blend into my background as seamlessly as I’d hoped, and the image didn’t look right to me. I was thinking back on “The Aziza Fairy” and the flower petals that communicated a sense of scale in that portrait. I asked Elizabeth what she thought, and she suggested dandelion fluff. Fortunately, those elements were easy to find, and even more fortunately, they composited easily with the image, gave it a sense of scale, tying everything together.
Pixie Story Inspirations
Often in this series, this section has been the place where I wax nostalgic on photographing fey at the Bristol Renaissance Faire or writing about fey creatures for Dungeons & Dragons. So why stop now?
An enchanted race born of raw fey magic, pixies are the diminutive fairy folk of the Feywild. Under the direction of the Court of Stars they etch the patterns of frost upon the pond and rouse the buds in springtime; they cause flowers to grow and sparkle with summer dew, and they color the leaves with the blazing hues of autumn. Some say they stole the secret of honey from the mead goblet of the Summer Queen and sold it to the bees, and that they taught the birds to fly and sing. Pixies’ very existence defies death, and the glimmering light of their presence extinguishes shadow. Childlike sprites with a penchant for mischievous fun, there is no game a pixie will not play, no sport it will not attempt, no revelry it will avoid or decline.
Heroes of the Feywild
In 2010, among other writing and design contributions, I was tasked with designing the pixie as a player character race for the 2011 Dungeons & Dragons book Heroes of the Feywild (co-written and designed under the leadership of Rodney Thompson and with the assistance of designer and artist Claudio Pozas). The passage above was my opening paragraph for the pixie entry.
When I edit these images, I think back on that time researching pixies—consolidating lore with literature, pop culture, and D&D tradition, writing prose as lyrical as I could get away with in a D&D book. I think about staying up late at night in the place we used to live (a residence owned by the ambassador to the fairies, one “Wiggins”), reading up on all the fairy lore I could find in the expansive library of books on the fey that stocked the shelves of that place. I think of times I got a little misty-eyed watching the story of Peter Pan, clapping hands, wanting to believe.
Now I’ll think of this image of Kristen McCabe and the dandelion fluff, but also of this line I found in the Wikipedia article, which tells of the diminishing of pixies, or a belief in them, around Cornwall in the nineteenth century. It haunts me.
The age of pixies, like that of chivalry, is gone. There is, perhaps, at present hardly a house they are reputed to visit. Even the fields and lanes which they formerly frequented seem to be nearly forsaken. Their music is rarely heard.
Samuel Drew, Cornwall
Many thanks once again to Kristen McCabe and Rose Nobs for their time and talent in making this portrait with us!
Next in The People of Light and Shadow series…
Perhaps it will be a muse, perhaps a fairy queen. Only the fey say tell for certain.
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