A Fairy Tale Town — From Drawing to Etching
by Diana Bychkova
Nov 2025
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The story of this etching began as part of a series of detailed drawings inspired by my fascination with Italian medieval towns — their narrow stone streets-corridors, arches, rustic brick walls, delicate metal wind-vanes... I studied how fairy-tale elements appeared in medieval European manuscripts: the fantastic architecture, ornamented pages, and handwritten texts that transformed into vines and mythical beasts.
Source of inspiration: a 15-day bike trip across Piemonte and Liguria, 2007.
Scroll through pictures 👉
The result was thirteen large drawings filled with fairy-tale characters, each reflecting the medieval spirit in a contemporary interpretation. Later, these drawings became an illustrated book. One of them I transformed into a hand-engraved etching — a delicate, intricate work that reflects my love for the fantastic and for traditional techniques. My artistic aim was to create passages between different temporal and spatial worlds.
In this picture (no. 1/13 in series), the figure of a king is placed into an empty town square. The town is moved away from him, so the emptiness emphasizes his tragedy: he knows that his little daughter has been stolen by a sea monster. At this point, his (and the reader’s) imagination sees everything in the town like something transformed into sea objects. The houses bob up and down like waves and have elements of sea beasts, and even the square is surrounded by seaweed. It seems that the sea together with the monster has absorbed and dragged the entire town to the bottom (the tentacles have surrounded some houses and become parts of the city walls). But at the same time, something common is happening beyond this: the birds are in the sky, and the boats are at the pier — because the sea beasts are only born out of the king’s imagination.
Sometimes, the imagination is more important than reality. Thus, such transitions between the real and the fantastic, between this world and another one create the effect of simultaneity of the past-present-future and of the presence of real and imagined dimensions.
Proceeding this way, one can find such temporal-dimensional transitions in each drawing — where they create additional levels of the non-verbal story.
Created almost twenty years ago, this etching has been exhibited and awarded prizes internationally, yet it has never been offered for sale. Now, it’s ready to find a home — bringing a story of persistence, craft, and imagination to your walls.
Watch how A Fairy Tale Town came to life — from drawing to zinc-plate engraving and to the final print.
This series celebrates the craft of traditional etching — the very techniques I study and teach through the Rare Collections Project. The etching is available for the first time, and owning it is more than acquiring a work of art: it directly supports the Rare Collections Database, helping preserve and share exceptional works of book art with students, teachers, and collectors.
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Every copy of A Fairy Tale Town is hand-printed using traditional techniques — the same skills we preserve and document through our Rare Collections Project.
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