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Fairyland Studio
It's not what you think; a refreshing, Terry Gilliam-like reconstruction of vintage graphics in the service of Fairyland and Squid-Headed Babies.

Based in Austin, Texas, Fairyland Studio offers a unique brand of reconstructed vintage art, very much like Terry Gilliam's animations back in the days of Monty Python's Flying Circus - classic illustration and advertising art is snipped up, recombined, and amusingly presented all over again in unexpected contexts.
There's quite a bit of skill shown in the work - it's not the hodgepodge collage you might be expecting. Delve deeper!


Fairy Queens, Bird Women, and Squid Headed Babies

fairy art tshirts The site layout (about which, more later) gives the visitor a large menu of designs - each design is a section or aisle of its own, and the design is available on a variety of t shirts, ornaments (nice!), journals, greeting cards, coffee mugs and so on. About the only thing missing is kids' and toddlers' clothing, but in fact the white t-shirts are available in childrens sizes. Check the "Size" dropdowns. Not all of the designs are available on all the merchandise, so you'll need to dig in a bit.
Within this menagerie of fairyland, one can make certain classifications and categories.
Baby Cthulhu tshirtMany of the designs are stand-alone single figures on a plain background. There's a series of "Fairy Queens", all based on vintage images of women remixed with vintage insect illustrations - like the "Mantis Fairy Queen", for example - and along with that pleasant Monty Python-ness there's a neat sort of Rohrshach Blot quality to these.

Another series combines women and animals - many of them birds - whether it's bird-headed woman fairies like the "Grackle Girl" or the eponymous "Miss Hippo Fairy". All are clever ideas, executed, well, cleverly.
And there's the occasional non sequitur like the incomparable, H.P. Lovecraft inspired "Squid Headed Baby".


Miscellany - Seed Labels and Vintage Photographs

fairy design t shirtAnother small series is the Seed Packet Labels - "Poppy Pixies Seed Label", for one, and "Southern Belle Fairy Seed", for another. These really do recall vintage packaging art and make a nice addition.
There are also a few reinvented vintage photographs, a lot like those Victorian fairy photographs that so interested Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
And there's a playfully random sprinkling of fairies that defy classification. Overall there are a lot of wonderful things to explore here.



What's not to like?

vinatge fairy art tshirt
Very often, a store site like this one organizes its merchandise by design, and that's true here. Each design gets its own sub-section where the t shirts, coffee mugs, posters and other items are shown.
One problem with that is that eventually there are so many designs that a sidebar listing all of them becomes very long and illegible; while the many individual icons on the front page, which lead to the design sub-sections, can take a long time to load and turn into an unreadable wall in much the same way as the sidebar.
I have the feeling that this shop site started small, with just a few designs, but that it's now outgrown the navigation that probably worked very well in the beginning, when the selection was much smaller.
I also think that's not a very major problem. Once you get a look at some of this work you will want to dig deeper and further and find it all.

 


 
All designs on reviewed merchandise and web sites are copyrighted by the artists and merchants reviewed.
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