Introducing the White Cat Sequel

I'm finally ready to start posting my White Cat Sequel. I started on it two years ago - in stops and starts - but never finished photographing it. Mostly because I hadn't figured out the ending. The story was to be about what happened after 'Happily Ever After' in the old French Fairy Tale, the White Cat

the Background

It all started thirty years ago, back in 1992, when my sister Marianne and I were just starting out making OOAK dolls together. We thought it would be fun to do a photo story using some of our dolls. I went through my fairytale books looking for an interesting, yet relatively unknown, story, and we ended up choosing the White Cat, an old French fairytale written by Madame d'Aulnoy, and published in 1698. We set about making the two main characters; Prince Adrian, and the Princess Blanchette in her human form. Marianne sculpted and painted them, while I made their costumes and finished them. We also made eight cat figures, which we sculpted and painted together, and I dressed. All the other human characters were existing dolls we had standing around at that time.

​The original Prince Adrian and Princess Blanchette. They were among the first of the dolls my sister sculpted, and not yet up to the caliber of her later work.  But we thought they were great at the time.

the Story

In the White Cat story, a king, fearing that he will lose his throne to one of his three sons, sets them impossible tasks to distract them. First he says that the one who can obtain the smallest and most beautiful dog will become the next king, and gives them a year to obtain it.
The three princes set off separately. The youngest son travels far and wide, and eventually discovers a fantastically decorated castle hidden in the woods, which is inhabited entirely by intelligent, talking cats. Their queen is a beautiful little white cat, who invites the prince to dinner and entertains him. He is surprised to see that the cat wears a locket containing a portrait that looks just like him. The prince remains in the white cat's castle happily for nearly a year, enjoying many entertainments, until the white cat reminds him of his mission and bestows him with an acorn, telling him that the dog is inside. When he returns home and breaks open the acorn, inside is an impossibly tiny dog which dances before the king.

Although the youngest prince is clearly the winner of the contest, the king sends the princes out once more, this time in search of muslin fine enough to be drawn through the eye of a needle. While his brothers begin to search once more, the youngest prince returns immediately to the white cat's castle and spends another year there. At the end of the year, she sends him home with a walnut. The older two princes bring muslin which can fit through the eye of a large needle. Inside the youngest prince's walnut is a hazelnut seed, which contains a successively smaller seeds. Inside the smallest seed is a massive amount of muslin, magnificently embroidered, which fits through the eye of any needle.
The king still reluctant to give up his throne, sets a third task, telling them that whoever can win the most beautiful princess for a bride would be king. The youngest prince returns once more to the white cat's castle, and she promises to help him win this contest as well. Over the next  year, he guesses at the cat's background, but she refuses to tell him.
At the end of the year, she tells him that she can give him a beautiful princess, but only if he will first cut off her head. The prince at first refuses to cut off his beloved cat's head, but is eventually forced to comply. Then, from the cat's body appears a beautiful woman, while the cat courtiers are transformed into humans.
The princess finally explains her past, and they set out together for the prince's kingdom, where she is found to be far more beautiful than his older brothers' brides. However, the former white cat rules over six kingdoms, and bestows a kingdom each on his father and older brothers, leaving her and the youngest son still with three kingdoms over which to reign. They celebrate a triple wedding.

Our Version

Although we loved the main storyline, we found the ending too gruesome, so we changed it.

Our book was made in the days before digital cameras, Photoshop, or colour printing, so we had to get creative. ​

We had to take photos the old fashioned way, using a film camera, get them printed, and stick them onto colourful border pages with the text, and slip those into plastic sleeve pages in a binder.....

I also didn't have all the sets I have now - in fact I didn't have any at all - so we had to get really creative with backgrounds as well. Some of the outdoor scenes could be photographed in our own backyards, but for fancier gardens and all the interior shots, we had to come up with something else.  We'd look in our books for pictures of suitable interiors - or find calendar pictures. Then Marianne would take photos of the dolls in the correct poses in such a way that they'd end up being the right size in the photographs when we had them printed, so she could cut them out and position them on the book page and reshoot the cut-outs on the book photo, for the final photo. ​

Or if we could find a close up picture from the same castle, we'd hold it behind the dolls....

Marianne would have to use the same cut-out technique to have it appear that the dolls were in a nice garden or exterior setting....

After finishing our books, I kept Prince Adrian, Blanchette, and five of the eight cats that we had made.....

The years passed, and we stopped making dolls together, and I eventually discovered the world of ball-jointed dolls. I thought my Iplehouse BJDs were infinitely more attractive than those early  sculpted dolls, and started eyeing their costumes. It seemed convenient that my JID ladies were roughly the same size as that old Princess Blanchette, and her costume although sewn on, did not use any glue, so would be easy enough to remove.

​So in 2012 I made the decision to just go for it. I carefully picked Blanchette's gown apart, and since the reworked version would need to be removable, I decided to make it into several separate parts in order to help reduce the bulk...

The bodice could be worn with or without the sleeves, which could hook on at the shoulders. The skirt was made into two layers.

My Isar, a JID from Iplehouse, had just arrived that spring, and she was the initial model for the reworked dress....

Then the search was on for someone to replace Prince Adrian. I purchased a Limhwa Mono on the secondary market, and thought he'd make a good Prince, so removed all the clothes off the original Prince, and reworked it for the new guy.....

Yes, he was rather young looking, but mature looking dolls his size did not exist back then.

He made a great Prince Adrian, and immediately adopted his name as well as his costume.  Only thing was, I had a problem.  Prince Adrian was a pale French resin, and I didn't have any pale resin ladies, and it just wouldn't do to have any of my darker resin ladies be the Princess.  I felt that she should be pale like her Prince. So during Iplehouse's Winter Event that year, I ordered JID Kassia, in Normal resin, specifically to wear the white gown....

Kassia with her White Cat counterpart....photographed together in early 2020....

After photographing Kassia and the White Cat together, inspiration hit.....why not come up with a sequel to the story?  Kassia and Adrian were definitely a couple, and had appeared in a few short stories together, but it could be interesting to come up with an entirely new story - a follow up to their original background story. I still had five of the original eight cats that we'd made thirty years ago, and with a digital camera and PhotoShop, so much more would be possible now. So I started to think about a rough storyline.  

I thought it would have been nice to have a few more cats, and Marianne, who still owned one of the three cats she originally kept, gave me hers.  She had also taught some sculpting classes years ago, and her cat class had been a favourite, and I had one of her blank, wired, cat  samples. In my new story I was going to need a cat version of Prince Adrian, so I painted my blank cat in colours close to Adrian's hair colour, and made him a costume as close as possible to the original which had been made thirty years ago. I even still had a few of the original fabrics!  However, the only spare boots I had were brown, instead of black, but they'd just have to do.

Then a friend, who knew about my plans for a sequel, and also had one of my sister's blank samples, offered me hers. So I printed out some nice cat pictures to help as a reference when I painted it....

Then I finished the cat, dressing it like a maid in a smaller copy of an existing costume, just in case she'd need to appear in her human form at some point in the story...

Then in early spring of 2020 I started shooting my story....

I photographed Kassia, seated at the window, dreaming of when her Prince would return. It was the very first time I ever photographed a doll at that window in the bright light like that, and I loved it, and it became the inspiration for all the ones that have followed since...

Then in March 2020, winter was almost over, and we went out on location to shoot a few scenes in the snow....

...and at the Ruins Garden....

....but then a few days later Jan got sick, and ended up in the hospital for a month, and they took away his driver's license for six months. Covid had hit at that same time and everything was in lockdown, and the photography had ground to a halt.  I did get some motivation back later that year, and shot a few more scenes, but the storyline had gotten so complicated that I hadn't figured out a way to resolve it, so the photography stalled again.  

But I have it pretty much figured out now, and am back to shooting the missing scenes, so am ready to start posting the first part of the story....so stay tuned...