Sleeping Beauty 2 (section)

This enchanted woodland comes straight from the imagination of Eyvind Earle, the artist behind the distinctive look of Disney's 1959 film Sleeping Beauty. As the color stylist and background painter for the movie, Earle brought a bold, stylized vision that broke from anything Disney had tried before. His signature elements are all present here: slender trees reaching skyward, leaves speckled with gold, and crisp detail worked into every reed and blade of grass. A hush hangs over the whole scene, giving it that unmistakable fairy tale feeling.

Earle used light and dark to guide the eye through the picture. Shadowy, moss-covered banks border a still stream that curves back toward a glowing green clearing far off in the distance. The trees rise like the columns of a great cathedral, and the deliberate flatness of the design recalls a medieval tapestry. Much of this came from Earle's love of early Renaissance and Gothic art, which explains why these woods feel both timeless and like something out of a dream.

Behind the beauty lies an enormous amount of patience. Earle worked in such painstaking detail that he sometimes took ten times longer on a single background than his fellow artists, an approach that not everyone at the studio appreciated. The payoff was a storybook world that still catches the eye decades later. Gazing into these trees, it is easy to picture a wandering princess just about to appear.