A princess stands with a rabbit, a small bird and a squirrel gathered around her. The gown is the interesting part to colour — tier after tier of ruffles with a bow on each, which gives you somewhere to try the same colour light at the top and deeper towards the hem. Gentle and unhurried, and it cuts out neatly if you want it for a wall display. Free to download and print.
It is a storytelling convention rather than a rule. In folk tales, animals that come to a person of their own accord are a shorthand for that person being kind — the reader is told something about her character without anyone having to say it. Illustrators took the habit up, and it stuck, so small woodland animals such as rabbits, birds and squirrels turn up around princesses again and again.
🐦 Which animals appear in the original fairy tales?
The printed tales are older and stranger than the versions most people picture. In Perrault’s Cendrillon of 1697 a fairy turns mice into horses, a rat into the coachman and lizards into footmen. In the Grimms’ Aschenputtel there is no fairy at all — birds living in a hazel tree on her mother’s grave bring her the gowns and pick the lentils out of the ashes for her. In the Grimms’ Snow White, birds and forest animals come and keep watch over the girl in her glass coffin. The familiar animal casts many of us grew up with come from twentieth-century films, which changed a good deal.
🎨 What colours suit the animals?
White or pale pink for the rabbit, sky blue or yellow for the bird, brown or russet for the squirrel — those are the safe choices, and they keep the three animals clearly apart from one another. But this is a fairy tale, so a lavender rabbit or a mint-green squirrel is no less correct. The one thing worth holding on to is contrast: if the animals end up the same tone as the gown, they stop reading as separate creatures.
