One of the most beloved children’s books, both admired by children and adults alike, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is celebrating it’s 150th Anniversary in 2015. To celebrate the release of this one of the most iconic children’s stories of all time Pan Macmillan, the original publishers of the Lewis Carroll, will be publishing the complete range of Alice titles in print, digital and audio for everyone to enjoy. Sir John Tenniel’s iconic illustrations for the book, plus Harry Theaker’s re-coloured versions of the illustrations will be the main focus of the celebration. Macmillan Children’s Books, a division of Pan Macmillan is one of the UK’s biggest children’s books. It is the home to many wonderful classics such as Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle book and has been creating all sorts of mesmorising stories for over 150 years. The company now produces well over 400 books a year for babies, children and young adults alike.
The Brief
“Create a new cover and up to two wondrous interior page illustrations for one of our most precious pieces of heritage: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Your illustrations should enchant a whole new readership and, although you must include a front cover, you are free to choose a couple of scenes from the book. These might be new interpretations of scenes that have been drawn before or entirely new ones – it’s up to you. We are entirely open to styles of illustration too. A selection of entries will be displayed at our offices in King’s Cross, on our website and on the Alice Facebook page.” - Pan Macmillan Children’s Books I will be selecting three different scenes from the book that John Tenniel did not illustrate using a completely different style to give a new, visually re-imagined look to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
To the right are some various scenes from the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland book that I am considering to base my three illustrations on. These were taken from the latest edition of the book that Macmillan Children’s Books recommended we referenced from in order to make it easier to reference page numbers with the illustrations we produce. The scenes that are highlighted in red are the three scenes I will be doing illustrations for.
Chapter 1: Down The Rabbit Hole (Page 4) This scene is probably more memorable from Disney’s animated adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. The iconic scene of Alice discovering the rabbit hole and falling down what seems to be an bottomless hole, filled with grandfather clocks, jars labelled “orange marmalade” and many other out of place furniture.
Chapter 6: Pig and Pepper (Page 83) The cook takes the cauldron of soup off the fire and then begins to throw everything she can at the Duchess and the baby, from fire irons, saucepans to plates and dishes. The Duchess takes no notice despite the fact she gets hit, the baby continues to cry even louder than before.
Chapter 3: A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale (Page 33) This scene is when Alice and various other creatures need to think of a way to get themselves dry. So the Dodo introduces them to the CaucusRace. The Dodo marks out a race track in a circle and they start running for half an hour until the race is over.
Chapter 6: Pig and Pepper (Page 93) After the first meeting between Alice and the Cheshire Cat, the Cheshire Cat begins to fade away and come back again on different tree branches, constantly surprising Alice as she tries to decide which path to take between the Mad Hatter or the Hare.
Chapter 5: Advice From a Caterpillar (Page 69) Alice takes two chunks from each side of the mushroom but is confused on which side will make her grow and which side will make her shrink.
Chapter 7: A Mad Tea-Party (Page 105) The Mad Hatter and the March Hare demand that the Dormouse tell a story. The Dormouse begins to tell a story about three sisters living at the bottom of a treacle well.
Chapter 8: The Queen’s Croquet-Ground (Page 125) Alice introduces the Cheshire Cat to the King of Hearts. The King doesn’t like the look of the cat but demands the cat to kiss his hand, the Cheshire Cat refuses. Chapter 11: Who Stole The Tarts? (Page 168) The Mad Hatter gets called as a witness in court for who stole the tarts, however he gets extremely nervous. The King says to the Hatter “Give your evidence, and don’t be nervous, or I’ll have you executed on the spot.” I can imagine that this scene will be quite a humorous illustration to do because of the King’s very pressured demand to the Mad Hatter. These scenes are the ones I have chosen because these scenes don’t have any existing illustrations produced by John Tenniel. I would feel like my work would be truly original if I worked on scenes that have never been illustrated before that I can use my own style of drawing on.
Bryan Lee O’Malley is best known for the critically acclaimed Scott Pilgrim series of graphic novels. The story consisted of Scott Pilgrim, a 23 year old slacker who lives in Toronto, Canada. When he stumbles across a girl that he wants to continue dating with, he has to defeat her seven evil ex-boyfriends in order to win her heart. More recently in 2014 however, O’Malley has produced yet another graphic novel called Seconds. Unlike the Scott Pilgrim series, this graphic novel has been coloured by Nathan Fairbairn to give a bigger sense of expression and detail to his illustrations. Alongside with using mainly warm colours like reds and yellows to make everything blend well
together. The story tells us about a 29 year old head chef Katie, founding owner of the most popular resteraunt in town called Seconds, she also lives just above the resteraunt. When things don’t go according to plan, a strange girl called Lis appears in the middle of the night. The strange girl gives Katie a notepad, a mushroom and some instructions. This gave Katie the power to do-over her past mistakes in order make her life better. I really enjoy O’Malley’s work because his drawing style is easy to look at as well as his sense of humour and references to video games and popular culture make it much more relatable to younger audiences. This is why he has been a big influence when it came to finding my own style.
Ken Sugimori is the main illustrator and character designer for the Pokémon video game franchise. Designing all the human characters as well as the vast majority of over 700 different Pokémon. These creatures vary from the iconic yet tiny Pikachu to the ginormous legendary Pokémon like Palkia, Giratina and Dialga (the Pokémon in the image above, from left to right). The Pokémon franchise debued in 1995 and soon rocketed to become one of the most successful franchises in the 90’s and early 2000’s. Even to this day the video games are still one of the biggest franchises in the whole of the gaming industry, certainly taking the handheld video game console market by storm.
Sugimori is also one of my biggest influences when it came to creating my own drawing style mainly because of his character designs for the human characters. How certain features like the eyes are overexaggerated and the character itself will have a few individual features that help distinguish their character to other characters to really make them stand out from one another. In addition, Sugimori’s character designs for the Pokémon themselves are inspirational too because of how they take certain concepts from culture or objects and/or real life animals and mix them together to create them. This outlook on character design should be great for when it comes to re-designing iconic Alice characters.
Here are all the characters that I will be illustrating for this project; Alice, the Caterpillar, the Mad Hatter and the King of Hearts. All of these characters are to scale, excluding the Caterpillar of course considering it would be tiny if we put it to scale. I figure it would be pretty humourous to make the King of Hearts shorter than Alice, taking inspiration from the Disney animated film interpretation where he was considerably shorter to the Red Queen to show who was the more dominant of the king and queen. When it came to the material that I wanted to use to colour the illustrations, I wanted to use a material that children also use to colour their drawings in. Colour pencils are a very common material that is used by young children whenever they do drawings and doodles, it is easy for young children to pick up and use. They may be easy to pick up to use, but they can be used to greater detail by someone of my ability. Colour pencils are one of my best materials to use and it really goes well with my style of drawing.
My first front cover design sketch that I produced was a side-view of Alice falling down the rabbit hole on her decent into Wonderland. It will start as a regularly dirty tunnel with light from outside creeping in to the tunnel, with Alice’s cat at the edge of the tunnel. Then there’s Alice falling down and decending into Wonderland where the title Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in a topsy-turvy like style is as the rabbit hole slowly fades into black.
This second design that I produced is my favourite out of the two for the front cover because the use of 3D layers. You have the title of the book and a thin lined white border going around the edge of the front cover, and you have Alice falling down the rabbit hole, with her head, hair and arms going over the white border and her legs and dress going underneath it. It makes it much more immersive for the viewer and makes the illustration and the title of the book blend well together.
The first illustration I made is going to be a very detailed and up-close full page illustration. I decided to produce full page illustrations because I don’t want disrupt the layout of the text of the book. For example page 37 of the book has the text layed out swaying from side to side getting smaller and smaller as though it was the tail of a mouse. The scene depicts Alice holding two sides of the mushroom looking very confused about which piece is which, as the Caterpillar walks away into the grass in the background.
Taking more of a comic strip approach, inspired by Bryan Lee O’Malley’s work, this sketch shows the Caterpillar informing Alice that “one side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter”. The bottom part of the comic strip will be a long distance shot of the mushroom, Alice and the Caterpillar. I think I prefer the comic strip/graphic novel style of approach because you never see anything like comic strips in childrens books, let alone in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which is why I think it will stand out to anyone else who is doing this live brief.
This first sketch I produced is from the perspective of the King of Hearts in the courtroom, he has just demanded to the Mad Hatter to “Give your evidence, and don’t be nervouse, or I’ll have you executed on the spot.” You will see the Mad Hatter looking absolutely terrified at being pressured into such a demand, shivering in the process. To highlight this, there is a spot light shining down on the Mad Hatter and everything else is in darkness.
Inspired by Bryan Lee O’Malley’s work once again, I’ve taken inspiration from a particular panel in one of O’Malley’s most recent graphic novels called “Seconds”. Where one of the characters stares at the other and it is heavily emphasised with huge rough looking text “STARE” going from one character to the other. I found this particular panel in “Seconds” to be quite comical indeed, and I thought it would be a humourus approach to this scene.
For all of the illustrations I decided to use regular colour pencils for the characters and important objects within each scene, and then watercolour pencils for the background as it really makes the characters stand out from the background. Colour pencils are easier to use and are better at making illustrations look more detailed for things like Alice’s golden blonde hair for example. In terms of the front cover, I decided to have a white frame around the edge of it so I could have Alice’s head and arms going over it and her dress and legs going underneath it. This makes the front cover that much more three dimensional and dynamic and it also blends in very well to the typeface that I used for the title “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. In addition to this, the typeface that I used for the author of the book suits the background due to it’s rough and more loose style as though it has literally been written on in chalk.
The second illustration that I produced to go alongside page 69 (Chapter 5: Advice From A Caterpillar) is by far the most busy of all three illustrations due to multiple objects like the Caterpillar’s hookah and the mushroom, Alice, the Caterpillar as well as the speech bubbles coming from both characters. This illustration was also the most difficult and time consuming to produce due to the background, which has multiple shades of green for different blades of grass. Since the background was done in watercolour pencil it took a while to either wait for the watercolour to dry or to make sure I’ve got the right shade of green or it’s blended properly. Initially the speech bubbles wasn’t supposed to have a watercolour texture, nor shading for that matter. But without these two aspects the speech bubbles stood out the most in the illustration because it was pure solid white against colour pencil and watercolour, so I added these aspects to make it blend in with the rest of the illustration.
The last illustration I produced was to go alongside page 168 (Chapter 11: Who Stole The Tarts?) is probably my favourite out of the three illustrations for multiple reasons. Firstly I like the comical effect of the bold, rough and striking word “STARE” going from the King of Hearts to towards the Mad Hatter and then seeing the Mad Hatter’s scared/pressured facial expression. Secondly is the method that I used to produce the word “STARE”, which was simply by using a thick fineliner and roughly going back and forth drawing lines that would eventually make up the letters for the word. This gives it a very angry tone to the illustration and instantly gives off the feelings of pressure. Finally, the backdrop in this illustration is the best compared to the other two illustrations because of the strong use of red along with the harsh black brush strokes to help emphasise the word “STARE” going across the page.