Fairytale Village Folk Art Print

Fairytale Village is 19 square pictures of make-believe villages, and there’s no open countryside in any of them. The houses fill the frame edge to edge: steep roofs covered in scalloped shingles, round and arched windows, blue front doors with little steps, towers with clock faces, and chimneys letting out curls of blue or orange smoke.

The style

Every shape has a heavy dark outline and flat color inside it, with a slightly grainy paper texture on top. There’s no soft blending between colors. The palette barely changes from picture to picture: deep ink blue, coral and terracotta, cream walls and dark brown roofs, with black tree branches reaching in from the sides. Several have a winding blue stream dotted with white stepping stones along the bottom, and a few have a crescent moon or a stylized sun in the sky.

Because the colors repeat so closely, any two or three of these hang together as a set without any extra effort. They also hold up well from across a room, since the outlines keep each house readable even in a small print.

Size

Each file is 4096 pixels square. At 300 pixels per inch that’s about 13.6 inches (34.7 cm) on each side, so a 10 x 10 inch or 12 x 12 inch square frame has plenty of room. For a rectangular frame you’ll have to crop. The busy, all-over patterns crop more easily than a landscape with one focal point, but check the tower tops before you trim.

Where they suit

The bold outlines and saturated blue work in a playroom, a reading corner or a hallway gallery wall. Print them in color. Much of the charm is the blue against coral, and that’s lost in grayscale.