Island Spirit # 3 (illustrated by John Carmine)

William Shakespeare writes about imprisonment in The Tempest, his final play for Dream and the final play of his career.

He writes a speech in which Prospero recounts the imprisonment of Ariel.

“Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee,
by help of her more potent ministers
and in her most unmitigable rage,
into a cloven pine,
within which rift
imprisoned though didst painfully remain
a dozen years."

This imprisonment mirrors that of Morpheus at the hands of Roderick Burgess, more than 400 years later.

This Island Spirit is one of the “more potent Ministers” mentioned in the play and appears in Sandman # 75, on page 17, in panel 1.

One thing really like about the two William Shakespeare stories from Sandman is that Charles Vess adds a lot of fun and interesting faeries and island spirits to the story. This gives the artists working on this portraits project the opportunity to draw unique and visually interesting characters.

John drew this Island Spirit and it’s pretty awesome. He used colored paper and drew over it using colored pencils. This gives a really interesting effect to the character. The whites used really help the character pop out of the page.