A. Draic Brom

"Gerda Gottlieb was born in the coastal town of Grenaa, rural Jutland, in 1886. Despite a conservative upbringing as vicar’s daughter, she somehow persuaded her family to let her leave home for Copenhagen as a teenager to study at the newly opened women’s college of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. There she met Einar Wegener, a student at the adjoining college, and married him when she was just 19. Living among artists, actors and dancers in Denmark’s capital, Gerda was inspired by the idea of performance and painted stylised, long-limbed, made-up figures who looked active rather than passive, as if challenging the viewer.

Gerda became interested in gender as a performance – long before philosopher Judith Butler – and in 1904, when one of her models failed to turn up for a sitting, she asked her husband to pose instead. He agreed, adopting the alter ego of “Lili”, who soon became Gerda’s favourite model. Lili started to dominate Einar’s life, too, and he eventually identified as male-to-female transgender. When Gerda’s paintings and drawings began to sell, the couple moved to Paris in 1912 and lived as two women in an artistic community.

“Gerda refused to be defined by her rural past or what she was born into or what society wanted,” says Rygg Karberg, “just as Lili did. Both women created themselves from scratch.” Gerda was commissioned to produce illustrations for La Vie Parisienne, Le Rire and La Baïonnette, becoming hugely famous and considerably outearning her spouse. “What is more impressive is that she got ahead without trying to be more like the men to do it,” says Rygg Karberg. “She loved makeup and fashion, and didn’t see why embracing these traditionally feminine things should make her any less strong. She wanted it all.” The other string to Gerda’s lyre was eroticism. Her playful nudes, including graphic illustrations for the memoirs of Casanova, were celebrated throughout liberal society for their groundbreaking ploy of depicting female sexual pleasure – “which isn’t something you see too much of in art!”, says Rygg Karberg."

Elves as subterranean builders and miners, spindly and pale from the lack of sunlight and with a highly developed sense of hearing, even to the point of echolocation, to get around in places with zero light. Talented craftsmen with small, precise fingers, masters of prosthetic technology because it’s all too easy for a delicate limb to get snagged in machinery or crushed in a cave-in.

Dwarves that are mountain and alpine-forest dwelling herdsmen, sturdy against the extreme climate. They pride themselves on the understanding that they know what’s important and are some of the best cavalry around- even able to tame and forge agreements with the big cats that wander the area. With solid legs and powerful shoulders from running up slopes or rappelling down them after stray lambs. Lowland dwarves that are seafarers, as surefooted on the rigging of a tossing ship as their mountain cousins are on the slopes.

You can draw whatever you want forever