Alice finally makes it into an illustration

Here’s a fact you didn’t know – maybe. Alice herself is depicted in only about half of John Tenniel’s illustrations of the two Alice books. There’s two ways you can look at that. On the one hand you can say – hey, that shows you don’t have to include Alice in all of your illustrations. On the other hand it does show that you can’t avoid illustrating her in a fair proportion of them.

So, I’ve written two and a wee bit chapters of “Alice’s Adventures at the Poles” so far. Up to last night I had made 7 illustrations. Only one of them featured Alice, and that one only showed her tiny legs. I’ve been putting it off. There’s reasons for this. I put it off so that I could a least make some decent illustrations and start to build up a little confidence. But then there’s also the question you have to think about when you’re illustrating Alice – how close to the original are you going to go?

In the last day or two I’ve made copies that show how Helen Oxenbury, Mervyn Peake and Charles Robinson each illustrated Alice. Each one of them went away from Tenniel, and so did many of the other illustrators of the books over the years. But then, they’re all illustrating the original stories. It makes sense to do something different with your depiction of the story because you want to put your own stamp on it and find a little bit of originality.

But. My Alice illustrations have to fit my new, original story. The originality is inherent. It makes sense for me to use a lot of the visual vocabulary that John Tenniel uses for the way he presents Alice, as a reassurance to the reader that this is still the same Alice as in the original stories. 

Very pleased with my first illustration of Alice. If I can get her features in a way that I like when I draw them I will be delighted.

If you look at my illustration you’ll see that she is wearing a traditional pinafore dress and has long hair. Differences are that my Alice’s hair is a little darker, and braided where Tenniel’s had an Alice band. I made the decision that I was going to use my older granddaughter as a face model – and Alice’s head is based on a photo of her. I fought a little shy of depicting her features in this first one -  that’ll come now I’ve worked out the way to go with her costume, hairstyle and proportions.

For a encore I made another version of my illustration of the snake that Alice encounters. Here’s the original.

Now, for one of my original drawings it isn’t badly done at all, especially considering that I was working it out as I went along. The slight issue that I had with it was that the snake’s head was a bit too cartoony. I had a lightbulb moment this morning about it. I’ve been writing notes about the background to everything I’ve written – which I’ve enjoyed every bit as much as writing the story and making the illustrations. While writing the note about the episode with the snake, I explained that a piece of advice he gives – when flattering royalty, lay it on with a trowel – originated with Benjamin Disraeli. Apart from the fact that it’s appropriate advice for him to give at this point of the story, I also used it because some people think that Tenniel used Disraeli a couple of times in his illustrations for Looking Glass – the man in the newspaper hat sitting opposite Alice in the train compartment does bear some resemblance to him and some think hat the Unicorn represents Disraeli while the Lion represents William Ewart Gladstone.

So it became obvious to me – I should give my sake Disraeli’s head! It needed just a tiny bit of tweaking of the description of the snake in the text to make it work. Clock, mirror and picture frame are all inspired by a illustration in Looking Glass.

To me this is the first illustration in which I’ve used just a touch of the grotesque – which is one of the things I like so much about Tenniel’s work.