Nursery rhymes

I gave a macabre treatment to my chosen nusery rhyme, Mary Mary Quite Contrary, this week's challenge at Sunday Postcard Art.

When I did some investigation on the web, I found an excellent UK site about the history of nurdery rhymes - rhymes.org.uk - and learnt that many of them go back in history and the seemingly child like imagery actually refers to torture.

In Mary Mary, the rhyme is about Mary Tudor, "Bloody Mary", thus called because she sent thousands of Protestants to the gallows. The silver bells are thumb screws and the "pretty maids" a guillotine called the Maiden. Mary's garden is the cemetery.

How precious are these rhymes when you consider how old they are and how we can still recite a lot of them by heart.

I used dimensional paint to represent blood, a photo of Mary Tudor, Gail's font (my own handwriting courtesy of Your Fonts) and sketched a gallows scene from Tudor England,colouring with Copics.