Alice Project - COMPLETED!

Yes, good people, today I have completed my challenge to copy all 92 of Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations for Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. In my last post I reported that I had five left to draw. Here they are:-

What do I say now? Well, in one way the whole challenge was harder than I ever thought, in as much as none of my copies is perfect and some of them just aren’t any good at all. On the other hand, though, I have finished it. To be honest, I wasn’t sure that I would, yet going about it systematically I’ve completed the challenge quite a bit quicker than I thought I would.

It might be a good idea to leave it a few days for my thoughts to crystallise before posting my thoughts on the whole challenge. But just to kick off, I’m sure that I’ve already made the point in a previous post that the illustrations in Looking Glass are as a rule darker than those in Wonderland, both literally and figuratively.I stand by that observation. It shouldn’t maybe come as a surprise that there are notable differences between the two sets – it was several years between Tenniel made both sets. Another thing that has struck me is that to my eyes, Alice in Looking Glass looks a tiny bit older – a tiny bit more mature – than she does in Wonderland. Her face is a little thinner, and no quite as large when compared with her limbs and body. I couldn’t say whether this was intentional on Tenniel’s part – it’s certainly possible, bearing in mind his prodigious visual memory.

Some of the illustrations to Looking Glass seem to me to be more complex than anything else in Wonderland. While there are some quite complicated compositions in the earlier book, they are so skillfully composed that there’s none where you can’t take in the main detail and the main narrative in a single glance. There are some in Looking Glass where I don’t think that this is the case. For example, the battle scene that I posted last time, and the fireworks scene above.

I think that I’m going to just sit on my laurels for a bit, take in what I’ve managed, and think about what’s next.