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I am super excited to announce that today sees the release of our latest design – The Falling Sickness – which is the first in our new collection titled Unnatural Acts of Flying. If you would like one of the new pieces, head to lamortclothing.com now, as they’ll be selling out fast. I have been working on this drawing on and off for over two years, and in that time there have been some twists and turns that have prevented me from finishing it sooner. I’ll explain more in a separate post. The Unnatural Acts of Flying collection will explore the folklore and iconography of the witch in flight. Over several hundred years, the imagery and written words used to describe women taking to the air changed in strange and fascinating ways. These dramatic shifts were fueled in part by the fantastical stories told by women who were on trial for witchcraft. Such stories were almost always extracted under torture or coercion of some sort. The Falling Sickness is based on one particularly powerful myth that was in print at least as early as the beginning of the 17th century, which states that a witch, on hearing the sound of church bells, will be thrown from the sky and unable to fly. The first written reference to this that I could find is in Compendium Maleficarum by Francesco Maria Guazzo, published in 1608, but there are supposed to be even earlier examples. I’ll be posting a lot more about how this drawing was researched and composed, so keep an eye out for that. Let us know in the comments what you think, and feel free to drop in any stories you’ve come across about flying witches. They may form part of our next design!