Alice Project- Looking Glass update

Welsh has a wonderful word – hwyl. There’s no single word in English which encapsulates it. Basically it kind of means heart, enthusiasm, drive. I’ve had the hwyl for making copies in the last few days – maybe not the skill to do it very well, but hey, you can’t have everything. Here we are then.

The kitten. I like this one even though it’s one of the simpler illustrations in the book. It was quick to make as well, couldn’t have been an hour from start to finish.

Alice going into the looking glass. I wasn’t looking forward to copying this one and the next one. There just looked to be an awful lot of rather complicated shading. As it happened though I really enjoyed it.Because Alice is facing away from us I didn’t have to worry about her face.

Alice coming out on the other side of the looking glass. Yes, I did have to worry about her face on this one. I didn’t do too bad a job on it either. I tried to do what Tenniel did, and drew this on the other side of the page showing Alice going into the glass.

The Red King and Red Queen. This is another pretty busy illustration. When I’m working my way through I’ve tried to be very systematic. Since setting myself the challenge I’ve tried to work through the remaining illustrations in the same order in which they appear in the text. This means I tend to look ahead to see just how complicated the next sketches are going to be and to get an idea of how long it’s likely to take to do them. I knew that this one was going to take a couple of hours, and it did, too.

Conversely, this one of the White Knight wasn’t going to be particularly irksome. I don’t know, the last three or four copies that I’ve made just aren’t quite as good as I’d like, even though it was quick and relatively simple to make.

I was quite pleased with this sketch showing the chessboard layout of Looking Glass Land when I made it, but looking at it again in the cold light of day, meh, it’s alright.

With this sketch of the Red Queen’s Race, I made the mistake of drawing Alice to small, so the whole sketch is too small. Again, it is okay but it’s not as good as I’d like to be. I like the idea of the red queen’s race, though, having to run as fast as you can to stay where you are. There’s a metaphor for life if I ever heard one.

To be fair this is a decent copy. It’s an interesting sketch this one. The guy wearing the newspaper hat does seem to have a strong resemblance to Benjamin Disraeli, the former Prime Minister who was one of the targets of Tenniel’s satirical cartoons on many occasions.

There are three illustrations of the strange and unusual flies that Alice encounters an I’ve copied the first – he rocking horse fly. Not a bad job but it’s a simpler original illustration in the first place.

Observations? Well, I think it’s probably better to wait until I complete the challenge before I try to make any hard and fast pronouncements. So, the current score is

Looking Glass – 25/50

Overall – 67/92