Back to the journal

 I reported earlier today that I have completed the 30 direct watercolours for the 30x30 challenge. One of the results of this is that this afternoon I felt free to pick up my fineliners again. For my birthday on the 15^th my daughter Jess bought me a copy of Treasure Island with the wonderful Mervyn Peake illustrations, which is now a treasured possession. So I took a few hours and made this copy. Nice to be working with fineliners again and nice to be working in my current A5 sketching journal again.

Peakeing again, and Good old Harry Boy

Well, it’s been a gently productive week, peeps. First, let’s look at the copy I made of one of Mervyn Peake’s Treasure Island illustrations. I have to say that this illustration of Long John Silver is one of my favourites. There’s something almost skeletal about the way that he is depicted here, with his skull like lower jaw, and the clear outline of his ribs. This is a malevolent Long John Silver. With Peake’s illustrations you never lose sight of the pirates as men capable of evil. They are cutthroats, every one. 

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Now I’d like to come back to Harry Rountree. I wrote in detail about this wonderful illustrator last week. One of the points I made was that you can find many of his illustrations on the web, but they are mostly those he made for Wonderland. Harry – I’d like to think that we would have got on had we lived at the same time and known each other so I take the liberty of using just his first name – did illustrate Looking Glass too, but it can be much harder to find them on the net.

Or so I thought. I’ll explain that in a moment. Last Sunday I found a reasonably priced edition of the two books that contained Harry’s illustrations. It’s a Collins Pocket Classics edition. The bookplate says that it was presented to the recipient in 1949 and that seems about right. This was a year before Harry passed away.

Now, I don’t believe that the book contains all of the illustrations Harry produced for Looking Glass. I don’t know how many he produced for Looking Glass. 21 are reproduced here including a single colour plate with Harry’s striking depiction of the Jabberwock. What makes me think they may have left some out? Well, this edition only reproduces 21 illustrations from Wonderland too, and I know from my other copy of the Harry illustrated Wonderland that he did many more than this.

Okay, so allowing for all that I’m delighted to see more of Harry’s Alice illustrations that I’ve never seen before. Only. . . well, a couple of the illustrations I have seen before, incorrectly described as illustrations of Wonderland. Then there’s this one I’ve even made a copy of.

I’ll be honest, when I made it last week I mistakenly thought that this was Alice with the Queen of Hearts. I’ve seen it described as such on the net. It is also printed on the inside over of my copy of Harry’s Wonderland – and this edition only contains the earlier book. Why? I have no idea. I didn’t realise hat this was in fact Alice with the Red Queen until I saw it in the Collins combined edition, with a caption from the text printed underneath. And it’s clearly meant to be the Red Queen when you look closely. Peaking out of her robes, her body does resemble the base of a chess piece.

Well anyway, yesterday I made my first straight copy from the book, Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Here it is:-

Earlier in the week I made this copy of Alice and the Duchess from Wonderland:-

Finished with Harry for today then? Not quite. In the middle of last week I ordered a copy of an edition with Harry’s 1908 illustrations. I doubt I will end up copying these when it arrives, because I think that they were all or mostly colour plates. You know me and what happens when I try to copy coloured originals. Still, I can’t wait to see it when it’s delivered.

Two More Treasure Island Copies

I did say that I was leaving Treasure Island to one side for a moment. Well, it’s only a moment. My next TI copy was of an 1895 illustration by Louis Rhead. He was born and trained in England, but emigrated in the 1880s when offered a position with a New York publishing firm. He illustrated many classic adventure stories at the turn of the 20^th century.

My second is another Mervyn Peake.

Mervyn Peake - Master of All Trades

Well, having started I might just as well continue. I’ve written about Edgar Thurstan and I’ve written about John Tenniel. So I might just as well go on and write about some of my other favourite Alice illustrators. So let’s discuss Mervyn Peake.

I was going to start off by saying that Mervyn Peake, like John Tenniel, was one of the illustrators of the book who really showed at least a touch of genius. But then on reflection I don’t really like the word genius. Genius has the connotations of an effortless, God-given gift, almost as if it somehow exists outside of the individual who is merely a vessel through which it works its wonders. And that’s not what I mean at all. So please, if I should happen to use the word genius, please accept that I mean rare, outstanding brilliance.

One of the remarkable things about Mervyn Peake is that he is at least as well known as a writer as he is as an artist. He was that rarest or rara aves, a master at both. His lasting fame is assured by his Gormenghast series of stories – a trilogy of novels and a novella. These are works of fantasy and the darkest of black humour. To some extent his writing makes me think of him as a dark and twisted Dickens. The first two Gormenghast novels – “Titus Groan” and “Gormenghast” were written in the forties, an exceptionally productive period for Mervyn Peake. During this same period he illustrated both Alice books and also Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island”. It’s well worth taking a look at Peake’s illustrations of Treasure Island. For me they are the definitive illustrations of the story, and they are dark, disturbingly so.

Not so very long ago I watched a BBC documentary about some of the illustrators of Alice. Mervyn Peake’s son was interviewed and he made the interesting point that Peake made his Alice illustrations not long after he was assigned as an artist to the Nazi War Crimes trials in Nuremburg after the Second World War, and he sees the influence that this had on his father in Peake’s illustrations of the malevolent figure of the Queen of Hearts. That’s a fair point. Yet for me, a remarkable thing about Peake’s Alice illustrations is that they are largely so bereft of darkness, especially compared with what he produced for Treasure Island. I say largely. Peake’s Cheshire Cat looks almost demonic. For the most part though his Alice illustrations are lighter than Tenniel’s, far more dynamic than Tenniel’s and, to be honest, more fun than Tenniel’s. In the Gormenghast books Peake uses the grotesque, both through words and his own illustrations. He also uses the grotesque in his illustrations of Treasure Island. Yet he doesn’t seem to hardly use the grotesque in Alice. I might have nightmares about his Cheshire Cat but I certainly wouldn’t have nightmares about his Jabberwock, for example.

What he does do, though, is give us a world full of interesting and engaging characters. And it’s in this, the depictions of the personalities – and I use that word deliberately – of Wonderland and Looking-Glass world that Peake excels. He rarely gives us detailed backgrounds, sometimes they are little more than a few lines. If anything, it is almost as if he’s saying that the landscape of Wonderland (and Looking-Glass World) is made of the characters that populate it, and everything else within it is insubstantial and dreamlike. And this is a valid vision to put forward.

You should take a look at Peake’s illustration of the Hatter’s Tea Party. Many illustrators borrow from Tenniel, some of them quite heavily. Others of them seem to be primarily motivated by trying to be as different from Tenniel as possible and are therefore defined more by what they are not than what they are. Not so Peake’s hatter. At first sight he seems very different from the archetype. However, Peake is confident enough to give him a nose that, while nothing like Tenniel’s hawk beak, is just as prominent in its own way. There’s no sign of a Tenniel-esque top hat. Instead he wears a stack of hats of different styles that all seem to merge with each other. His body and limbs are in proportion to his head, and he seems younger than Tenniel’s. In the same scene Tenniel’s Hare is, well, he’s just a hare, with a bandage and a few straws sticking out of the top of it. Peake’s hare has a personality. He has a hare’s head, but his has a recognisable personality.

Likewise in “Alice Through the Looking Glass”, Tenniel’s Walrus wears clothes and boots, but when you get right down to it, he’s a Walrus wearing clothes. Peake’s Walrus also wears clothes but he has human arms and hands and legs rather than flippers. The clothes he wears are the waistcoat, jacket and pinstriped trousers of a successful businessman, but the shabby way he wears them marks him out as the louche conman that he is. While the Carpenter is one of the few characters that sees Peake veering towards grotesque, with his ridiculously elongated slab of a chin and his wild hair.

It’s worthwhile looking closely at Peake’s Alice. In no way can Peake’s Alice be described as a bystander like Tenniel’s Alice. She’s very much a participant and a willing one at that. At times she seems to be positively enjoying herself. You can’t imagine Tenniel’s Alice ever doing something so carefree and un-self-conscious as dabbling her fingers in the water as Peake’s Alice does in the Wool and Water illustration. She’s dark-haired and a little older than Tenniel’s Alice. Graham Greene who was a friend of Peake said that he thought there was a little too much of the gamine about his Alice. I think that this is a little unfair. Tomboyish – well, perhaps just a bit, but attractively tomboyish is maybe seeing something that isn’t necessarily meant to be there. Peake’s Alice is an unashamed free spirit who enjoys her adventures, and this rubs off on the viewer.

In a nutshell Peake gives us a different vision of Alice’s worlds. His work may never be seen as archetypal images in the way that Tenniel’s are, but for a set of illustrations to make you look again and get a fresh perspective, they’re pretty hard to beat.

There Goes Bill

You already know that it’s hard for me to find time for drawing in the evenings since starting my new job so I won’t go through all that again. Still, this weekend I’ve managed to work through the block I’ve had on writing the next chapter of “Alice’s Adventures at the Pole”. I haven’t finished it yet, but I think about 1000 more words will do it and I know exactly what to write and how to get to the end of the chapter. I’m just not forcing it. I will possibly finish writing the chapter this evening.

In celebration I spent quite a bit of time yesterday working on an illustration. In my first illustration showing Alice’s features I spent a long time before getting it right and the final version was actually my third attempt. Well, yesterday I spent quite a long time on the first attempt at the next illustration, before realising that it wasn’t going to work. 

Yes, that is a Walrus, and yes, I am conscious that one of the most famous and beloved poems in the Alice books is “The Walrus and the Carpenter” recited by Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Looking Glass. Well, this is the same character. If it was good enough for Lewis Carroll to resurrect characters from the first book in the second, then it’s certainly good enough for me. I shan’t at the moment explain just how he features in the story though.

The connections with Tenniel’s Walrus are fairly obvious. Although my head is more detailed than Tenniel’s, the clothes he wears are very similar, with the spotted bow tie being the most obvious difference. Tenniel’s wears a plain bow tie. However I did do something different with the flippers. Tenniel’s walrus has front flippers that are rather more like a seal's. They are a little more elongated than a walrus’ flippers and they have little definition. With my walrus I exaggerated the qualities that make a walrus’ flippers different from a seal’s, shortening them a little and highlighting some of the detail.

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Well, that’s my Alice story and illustrations. On Friday I made some more copies. Last week I looked at the way some different illustrators chose to illustrate the Hatter. This week I wanted to look at another character who I think is difficult to be original with, namely, Bill the Lizard.

This is what Lewis Carroll wrote,

“she made out the words: “Where’s the other ladder?—Why, I hadn’t to bring but one; Bill’s got the other—Bill! fetch it here, lad!—Here, put ’em up at this corner—No, tie ’em together first—they don’t reach half high enough yet—Oh! they’ll do well enough; don’t be particular—Here, Bill! catch hold of this rope—Will the roof bear?—Mind that loose slate—Oh, it’s coming down! Heads below!” (a loud crash)—“Now, who did that?—It was Bill, I fancy—Who’s to go down the chimney?—Nay, I shan’t! You do it!—That I won’t, then!—Bill’s to go down—Here, Bill! the master says you’re to go down the chimney!”

“Oh! So Bill’s got to come down the chimney, has he?” said Alice to herself. “Shy, they seem to put everything upon Bill! I wouldn’t be in Bill’s place for a good deal: this fireplace is narrow, to be sure; but I think I can kick a little!”

She drew her foot as far down the chimney as she could, and waited till she heard a little animal (she couldn’t guess of what sort it was) scratching and scrambling about in the chimney close above her: then, saying to herself “This is Bill,” she gave one sharp kick, and waited to see what would happen next.

The first thing she heard was a general chorus of “There goes Bill!” 

This little episode where giant Alice boots Bill the Lizard back up out of the chimney has proved a very attractive one to illustrators through the years. Now, I do think that a lot of illustrators have drawn on Tenniel’s illustration of Bill. However, I also believe that Tenniel himself drew on Lewis Carroll’s original.

If you’ve followed my blog posts on the illustrations of the Alice books, then you’ll probably know that Lewis Carroll first wrote some of his stories down at the urging of Alice Liddell, and presented the handwritten manuscript to her as a gift for Christmas 1864. The manuscript contained over 30 of Carroll’s own illustrations to the story. It is now in the British Library.

Carroll took advice about publishing the story with his own illustrations after which he engaged John Tenniel to provide the illustrations. So before we look at any of Carroll’s illustrations let’s accept a couple of facts.

Lewis Carroll never claimed to be an artist or an illustrator.

The first facsimile of Carroll’s original manuscript was never published until a relatively short while ago, so during his lifetime only a handful of people would ever have seen his illustrations.

So, bearing that in mind, here’s my copy of Carroll’s own Bill illustration.

I’ve never copied one of his illustrations before, partly because he was an amateur, and I’ve been afraid that my amateurish deficiencies might magnify his. I think that the Bill illustration is one of his better ones. For one thing the mathematician clearly knew a bit about perspective, from the way he drew the roof and chimneys. It looks to me as if, like many young men of his class and background, he probably had lessons in drawing when he was growing up, as he does use some shading and I’ve already mentioned the perspective.

Okay, now let’s have a look at Tenniel’s –

So one glance comparing the two shows that this is the work of a very accomplished masterful illustrator, while Carroll’s is the work of an amateur. Tenniel’s Bill is more lizard like as you’d expect. He was a master of shading and uses it far more effectively and extensively than Carroll could. He knows that Bill and the chimney are what’s important to the scene so doesn’t include any more than this.

Now look again and see just how Tenniel has drawn (pardon the pun) from Carroll. Both Bills are in pretty similar positions. The shape of the tail makes me think of a snake rising from a snake charmer’s basket. Carroll’s Bill seems to hover in mid-air, while the only thing about Tenniel’s illustration to suggest any movement at all is the smoke rising from the pot underneath him.

Compare this with the copy I’ve recently made of Harry Rountree’s Bill.

The composition to me draws on Tenniel’s which as we’ve seen draws on Carroll’s. Like Tenniel, we see the chimney pot and Bill coming out of it, just as with Tenniel. As fine an illustrator as Harry Rountree, though, wouldn’t just largely copy Tenniel. So he has Bill upside down, which to my mind works really well. Harry Rountree was renowned through his life as a great illustrator of animals and birds, and his Bill is even more convincingly Saurian than Tenniel’s. Unlike Tenniel, Rountree uses motion lines and has soot rather than smoke being expelled with Bill. This gives it a really explosive quality. It’s my favourite illustration of the scene.

We’ve seen before that one of the illustrators who often got further away from Tenniel than most others was Mervyn Peake. Here’s his Bill.

Like Rountree he chooses to use motion lines, but doesn’t depict the chimney. Bill’s whole body is curved sinuously and he’s fully clothed. It’s an interesting choice, but for me it’s a rare occasion when one of Mervyn Peake’s illustrations doesn’t somehow give the scene the movement that you’d expect based on what he achieved with other scenes from the story.

So I’ll finish this post with a look at my copy of what Ralph Steadman did with this scene.

It’s very easy to look at Ralph Steadman’s illustrations of both Alice books and say, well, they’re nothing like Tenniel’s. And of course when you put them side by side it’s far easier to see the differences than the similarities. But it’s still Bill rising head first out of the chimney – and that’s what Tenniel drew. This has far more of an explosive quality than Tenniel’s – like Harry Rountree he uses motion lines underneath Bill, and there’s soot being expelled along with the lizard. The originality of this sketch, apart from the comical expression on Bill’s face, is the way his cap is rising faster than he is, suggested by the motion lines. I’m intrigued that Ralph Steadman gave him a cap – was he possibly influenced in this by the depiction of Bill in the Disney film of the fifties?

Sketching the Hatter

Let’s start with a bit of context. In the summer I officially retired from being a teacher. Last Monday I started in my new proper job, a temporary position working in admin for the Community Dental Service, part of the NHS. I’m enjoying it a lot, however it does mean that I don’t have the time to draw and paint during the day and having been staring at a screen all day my eyes are too tired when I get home. So I haven’t made a huge number of pictures this week.

However, I have been looking more closely at the way that Tenniel’s successors have chosen to portray the Mad Hatter. Before that though, it’s worth noting that from his very first appearance of the Mad Hatter in Wonderland in Chapter VII – A Mad Tea Party, Carroll tells us what the Hatter says and what he does, but not what he looks like. Oh, and he never calls him the Mad Hatter either. He is first mentioned in the book when the Cheshire Cat offers Alice the chance to go one of two ways – one way she’ll meet a hatter, and the other a march hare, and he says that they’re both mad. The tea party doesn’t even appear in Carroll’s original manuscript “Alice’s Adventures Underground, so Carroll never illustrated him. So we have to start with Tenniel, and it must be fair to assume that Carroll was happy with the choices that Tenniel made. As always all of the illustrations on this page are my own freehand copies of the originals.

Despite never appearing in the original manuscript Carroll must have liked the Hatter, for he brought him back in Looking Glass. Across the two books Tenniel included the character in no fewer than 7 illustrations. In Tenniel’s illustrations he is a small man with short limbs and an overly large head. His most distinctive facial feature is his beakish overly large hawk nose. He wears a large spotted bow tie, and a top hat which has a ticket stuck into the band saying ‘In this style 10/6”. His hair is long and just a little wild. As I said, Lewis Carroll wasn’t exactly backwards at coming forwards when Tenniel did something he didn’t like with the characters so he must have been happy with this visual representation.

Tenniel’s is the definitive depiction of the Hatter, so much so that subsequent illustrators have found it difficult to get away from it. I haven’t yet copied Arthur Ransome’s, yet I have copied illustrations by his contemporaries Harry Furniss and the Robinson brothers, Charles and Thomas. Here’s Harry Furniss:-

At first glance this doesn’t seem to look like Tenniel’s Hatter, but that probably has more to do with the great animation of this figure. Harry Furniss was a colleague of John Tenniel’s so it’s no great surprise that this does actually bear similarities to Tenniel. There’s the top hat with its ticket – although we can’t read what’s written on it. The high collar is very reminiscent of Tenniel’s. The nose is overly large, like Tenniel’s. This one does at least look a little madder – the hair is more wild and the eyes are popping.

Charles Robinson’s illustration of the Hatter looks a million miles away from Tenniel’s at least. He is dark haired and younger looking. He wears a top hat, but the hat he does wear is upside down which I guess is the concession to madness. He also has a remarkably long nose although his is much straighter than Tenniel’s.

Charles’ brother Thomas Henry (T.H.) Robinson’s illustrations of Wonderland are to my eyes less original and more traditional than Charles’ despite being made at pretty much the same time. His hatter is quite a tall figure with a head that is much more in proportion to his body – if anything it’s a little small. His hair is dark and short. However he wears the traditional top hat, albeit one without a ticket.  Again, his nose is overly large, but all in all he looks very sane.

Harry Rountree also illustrated the Mad Hatter as early as 1908, and then again in 1928. The 1908 illustrations are sumptuous watercolours, and in this edition the Hatter is clearly recognisable as a pretty close cousin of what we’ve seen before. His top hat has a rounded top, but his nose is very large. His concession to madness is having what looks like rolled up paper cones in each ear. 1928’s Rountree hatter is facially pretty similar to the 1908 version. The hat is a true top hat, and to be honest although the illustration is as technically well done as all of Harry Rountree’s work it just seems to lack a little originality.

Coming forward to the immediate post war period, Mervyn Peake at least gives us something completely different from Tenniel. Or at least, almost completely different.

Mervyn Peake’s hatter has an overly large nose and his hair is rather wild but those are the only similarities he bears to Tenniel’s. I purchased a second hand combined copy of both Alice books with Mervyn Peake’s illustrations during the last week, and I’m bowled over by it. I’ve written before about how, as much as I adore Tenniel’s work, his illustrations to the books are sometimes a bit static and this is a criticism you just cannot make about Peake’s work. Peake’s hatter seems to wear a mad combination of hats of different styles and I love the way there seem to be plants sprouting out of the top of it.

Ralph Steadman’s illustrations to both Alice books, from the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies are marmite to me – I either love them, hate them, or love them and hate them. I think his Hatter is in the last category. To me, the hare and the hatter look completely under the influence of some kind of narcotic – both are conspicuously smoking something and this is something that Lewis Carroll never wrote. The Hatter looks more animal than human here, although in other illustrations his face is more clearly human. Making this copy helped me appreciate the illustration more, but I can’t say that I really like it. But, it is without doubt something worlds apart from Tenniel. It’s interesting that Ralph Steadman chose to concentrate on the mad aspect of the character than the hatter. Nowadays we don’t have hatters any more. Maybe this is because of the association with Alice – we have milliners. The only concession to his profession with Steadman is what appears to be a bowler hat, and that is almost lost amongst headphones and other bits of headgear.

After the madness of Steadman’s Hatter it’s a relief to come back to the relative cosiness of Helen Oxenbury’s 1999 Hatter. As a whole set I find Helen Oxenbury’s illustrations really bring out the lightheartedness and fun in the books. Her Hatter is one of the smallest nosed depictions, and one of the fleshiest faced. He wears three of what looks like a cross between a trilby and a fedora, each perched on top of a slightly larger version. He also has the kind of moustache associated with a ‘spiv’ of the forties and fifties.

Royal Talens Art Creation - 21x13cm

Yeah, I know, this is getting a little out of hand. So, let’s recap. You know that I bought a Royal Talens Art Creations sketchbook – portrait 9x14cm which arrived on Wednesday? I did like it a lot, and I’ve already made half a dozen sketches in it, all copies of some of Mervyn Peake’s simpler illustrations from Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. Okay.

Yesterday I fulfilled a very short notice commission. It was a one-off detailed pen and ink drawing for a birthday present and it involved five hours’ work. Thankfully the client was delighted – and let’s be honest, I was very pleased with myself as well. It capped off a great day. I mentioned in the previous post that I have recently retired from teaching. I’ll have my teacher’s pension, but in order to cushion the drop in income I’ve taken a temporary job, and yesterday I went in to meet the team I’ll be part of. They were great and I’ll be honest, I just can’t wait to start in a couple of weeks. So I’m sure you get the point – I was feeling happy and satisfied with myself yesterday evening.

Well, that can be a dangerous state to be in. In the couple of days I’ve had my Royal Talens book I’ve been thinking about buying the larger 21x13cm sketchbook. Last night, to reward myself I bought one from Amazon as a present. I did a little bit of research and found out that Royal Talens is a Dutch company, founded in Apeldoorn in 1899. They were just Talens then, until Queen Wilhelmina, obviously a fan, gave them the designation Royal in 1949.

Now, here’s a funny thing. A lot of travel sketchbook manufacturers seem to follow Henry Ford’s dictum of – you can have it any colour you like as long as it’s black.- He was talking about the Model T, which did eventually come in a range of colours, but you know what I mean. Well, not so Royal Talens. I was just about to click to buy a black one when I noticed that the coral-coloured book – exactly the same as the black one in every other way apart from the colour of the covers – was being sold for a pound less than Amazon were selling the black book. All I can guess is that the coral pink version does not sell as well as the black, light blue, green or yellow – which are other colours I’ve noticed that Royal Talens do. Well, look, I have never made a secret of the fact that I am a cheapskate of many years’ standing and my Scottish ancestors would never forgive me if I passed up the chance of saving a mickle in this way.

Royal Talens 21x13 Portrait sketchbook (left) alongside Moleskine equivalent. Spot the difference apart from the colour.

Actually it’s no hardship opting for this colour – it certainly marks it out as different from the Moleskine for example. I use Moleskine for comparison because in terms of physical dimensions this is very, very similar to a Moleskine. Even being a different colour these look very, very similar in most other ways. Even the matte finish of the covers feels similar – maybe the Royal Talens is smoother, but there’s nothing in it really. The paper inside, as we saw with my smaller RT sketchbook is of a very similar ivory tint to the Moleskine. It’s thinner, at 140 gsm to the Moleskine’s 165 gsm, but it’s hardly noticeable to the touch.

The most obvious difference between this Royal Talens sketching journal and other products competing for the same market like Moleskine and Seawhite is that there’s no document pocket at the back. I mean, this is not a huge thing. I like having the document pockets and they do come in handy when I’m travelling around. But it’s not really a deal breaker for me. If I wanted to I could glue a home-made pocket onto the back cover. But if the good people at Royal Talens were to ask me for my opinion I’d tell them it’s just a shame that this one omission makes their journal just slightly less appealing than it would have been.

This is not a review as such, since the new book only arrived this afternoon, and I’ve only had time to make 1 sketch in it. I haven’t tried watercolour on it yet, and I haven’t taken it out on the road yet either. Well, that’ll come and then we’ll be able to see where it ranks against Moleskine, Amazon Basics and Seawhite of Brighton.

Oh, that sketch? Right. Well, you know how I’ve returned to making my own copies of illustrations of Alice in Wonderland that I really like? I’ve made 6 copies of simpler Mervyn Peake illustrations in the little RT book, 1 copy of a simpler Mervyn Peake, 1 Ralph Steadman and 1 Charles Robinson in the Moleskine. In order to christen the new book I decided to have a go at one of Mervyn Peake’s much more complicated and detailed illustrations, which accompanies the chapter ‘Wool and Water’ in ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’. It’s just the first sketch in the book, but I was pleased with the results. It’s a pleasant surface to draw on, just like the smaller RT book. There’s no show through on the other side at all.

Close up of the sketch

Like I said, this is not a definitive verdict yet, but I’ll post again about it when I’ve really put it through its paces.

(Mock) Mock Turtles

 Right, so yesterday evening, after I put the watercolours away, I was watching TV and very often, when I'm watching I'll sketch with a pen at the same time. I thought to myself - what haven't I done with regards to the Alice books yet? Tenniel alone produced getting on for 100 illustrations for the two books altogether. One thing that occurred to me was that I haven't done the mock turtle yet. So I made this copy last night.

It really is the archetypal image of the Mock Turtle, and for me serves as something of a good demonstration of he imaginative genius of Tenniel. Carroll's own drawing of the Mock Turtle for 'Alice's Adventures Underground', the original handmade manuscript that he gave to Alice Liddell, it looks like a seal wearing plate armour. In the description n "Alice in Wonderland"  it says "I don't even know what a Mock Turtle is."

"It's the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from," said the Queen." Back in the day, green turtle soup was looked on as a delicacy. Thankfully we know better now. Due to the scarcity of turtles - hardly surprising since humans kept making them into soup, mock turtle soup was made of an alternative, using ground beef and offal. Hence Tenniel's decision to give his mock turtle attributes of both cow and turtle. 

This conception of the character has proven difficult for illustrators who came after to get away from. Here's my copy of dear old Arthur Rackham's

Again, it is instantly recognisable as the Mock Turtle, because it is pretty much the same in all the essentials as Tenniel's. Coming forward in time four decades, we have my copy of Mervyn Peake's conception of the character, here dancing around Alice with the gryphon:-

Superficially it's different. Once again Peake uses the strategy of using movement, which does have the effect of making his illustrations look different from Tenniel's. Instead of giving the character 2 turtle flippers and two cow legs, he gives him  human limbs instead. I'd dare say that the head is a sheep's rather than a cow's. Even so, though, the shell and the head are still obeying the Tenniel convention of a creature combining domesticated mammal and turtle attributes.

I don't know if Ralph Steadman drew the Mock Turtle for his Alice in Wonderland, but I haven't been able to find a copy of it if he did. All of which meant that I was beginning to despair of finding an illustration of the character other than Tenniel's which metaphorically blew my socks off. Then I came to Charles Robinson again. This is my copy of his illustration:-

Can you believe that this was made in 1907? Charles Robinson's illustrations for Alice in Wonderland are well worth finding. Some of them are very simple, and look unremarkable. Others, though, are stunning demonstrations of graphic illustration decades ahead of his time. In Robinson's illustration, the mock turtle looks like a real turtle, but what an illustration it is. 

How do you get away from Tenniel?

I am thinking about trying to produce my own illustration based on Alice in Wonderland or Alice Through the Looking Glass. Over the last 6 weeks or so I’ve made copies of almost forty illustrations of the  books by various artists. It’s time I had a go at putting my own stamp on it.

However.

There are a couple of problems. The first sounds like false modesty, but it really isn’t. I don’t have the skill of being able to conjure up good illustrations off the top of my own head, purely through my own imagination. John Tenniel had the most incredible visual memory. I don’t.

The second problem is one which has faced every other illustrator of the books since John Tenniel, namely, how do you get away from Tenniel’s illustrations? It’s a fair question. One way of doing it that we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks is to do something completely different. For example, Mervyn Peake’s frankly evil looking Cheshire Cat. Which is doable because nobody actually knows exactly what a Cheshire Cat should look like.

But how do you get away from Tenniel when all logic dictates that what you draw must inevitably end up looking similar? Well, here’s my copy of Tenniel’s Fish and frog footmen.

Let's compare it with my copy of a Mervyn Peake illustration of the fish footman. 

Superficially, they're pretty similar - similar costume with the breeches, the wig and the long tail coat - similar letters. However Peake manages to put his own stamp on this partly through having very minimal - almost non-existent background - and partly through depicting the fish running. One of the things I've noticed about Tenniel's illustrations is that the vast majority are static. Even some of the ones where characters are moving are strangely still. Off the top of my head, there's one from Wonderland with Bill the Lizard shooting out of the chimney, another with the Hatter storming off with his hat over his eyes, and in Looking Glass there's the Red Queen flying along with Alice in her wake. Other than that though the characters are often standing, or sitting, or striking poses. So depicting characters in movement is an option for getting away from Tenniel

This is one of Arthur Rackham's illustrations. Again, superficially the frog footman looks to be at the very least a close cousin of Tenniel's. As with Peake, there's a contrast with the way that Tenniel uses background in his illustration. Rackham could do very detailed background and I always felt that his depiction of forests and trees is masterly. Here, though, the background is extremely sketchy, especially when compared with Tenniel's. I don't think it's coincidence that Rackham chooses to depict the frog sitting, while it is standing stiffly, almost to attention, in Tenniel's. 

So, drawing a few lessons together from this, I can get away from Tenniel by firstly, thinking about the conception of the characters themselves, but also by thinking carefully about the way I use background detail, and also the positions of the characters, and the amount of movement in the picture.

None of which answers the question, though - if I am going to have a go at an Alice books illustration, which character or scene from the book am I going to have a go at? 

The Itch Test

2 years ago, during the first lockdown, I embarked upon a project of copying an illustration a day from 50 great British (or British based) illustrators. I thoroughly enjoyed it, although the results were often far from perfect. I learned about artists whom I was ignorant of previously, and came to appreciate some very fine work. My current obsession with illustrators of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books has had the same effect with me.

Of course, it all starts with John Tenniel. Following a prompt in a sketching group on Facebook, I copied a John Tenniel cartoon, “Dropping the Pilot” which led to me copying others. I’d copied at least part of several Alice illustrations over the last  years or so, but this reawakening of interest in Tenniel’s work then led to me taking on some more of the Alice illustrations, and so forth.

Of course, Tenniel has been one of my great illustrator heroes for a long time. For me, Tenniel’s work almost always passes what I’d like to think of as The Itch Test™. When I look at an illustration, if I really like it, then I get an itch to copy it. I almost always feel like this about Tenniel’s work. Admittedly, me copying a Tenniel sketch to try to understand how it was created is, I guess, a little like taking apart a working Rolex to find out how it works. The best you can hope for is not to do any damage. But I can’t help it. If you have an itch, then sooner or later you have to scratch it.

No other illustrator of the Alice books has made me itch quite so much as Tenniel. If we take Mervyn Peake, for example, I’ve already copied several of his illustrations for the Alice books, and some I think that some of his illustrations for the books rival, or (say it quietly) outdo Tenniel’s. But then some of them don’t make me itch at all. I think of, for example, his illustration of the Caterpillar. Peake was a great illustrator, and a superb draughtsman, and there’s nothing intrinsically bad about his caterpillar, but somehow it just doesn’t do it for me and I have no urge to copy it.

So, yesterday I decided to tackle Tenniel’s Humpty Dumpty. I like the way that the illustration is composed and constructed to give room on the page for the text. Afterwards I searched the internet for images of Humpty from Looking Glass produced by other artists, and I came upon one by an illustrator called E.B.Thurstan.

I wish that I knew more about Thurstan (not clear if this was a male or female illustrator) but I haven’t been able to find out anything. Still, the moment I saw it, my drawing hand began to itch – metaphorically at least. Yes, I think it’s fair to say that this is clearly in the tradition of Tenniel, but I think that the viewpoint looking down on Alice is particularly effective, and the background (at least in the original) is superb.

Speaking of itches, last week I thoroughly enjoyed copying Ralph Steadman’s Cheshire Cat. It started me looking more closely at Steadman’s illustrations for the 1973 editions of the Alice books. Ralph Steadman’s work has, I think, something of a marmite quality. I can understand you loving his work, and I can understand you having a strong reaction against his work – but I find it difficult to accept not having an opinion. I find that the Alice illustrations polarise me. I love certain illustrations, like this one of Alice and the White Knight which made my had start itching the moment I found it. 

On the other hand I really don’t like his illustrations of the Mad Hatter and March Hare, and also the caterpillar. Which is not to criticise the quality of the draughtsmanship. It’s that specific conception of the character depicted that I don’t like. Just a personal thing, and not something I think Ralph Steadman need lose any sleep over!

Peakeing too early?

I’ve been having another go at Mervyn Peake. As a copy this is far from perfect, but not for want of effort in my part. This is his realisation of the Walrus and the Carpenter. For me there’s echoes of the Tenniel original in that slabby chin of the Carpenter, although the elongated body is quite different. As is the walrus. What I like about Peake’s Walrus is, with his pinstriped trousers, there is a little more of the sly conman about him than there is in Tenniel’s, where he is, to all intents and purposes, just a walrus.

More Cheshire Cats

 Yes, I decided to take the Cheshire Cat theme and run with it some more. So let's recap. We have my copy of Tenniel's Cheshire Cat: - 

Then I added my copy of Helen Oxenbury's illustration of Alice and the Cheshire Cat :-

- and then my copy Mervyn Peake's 

SO, who have we got to add today? Well, here's my copy of Arthur Rackham's

Rackham's cat itself isn't that striking in comparison with some of the others. He's a little thinner and a little more manic than Tenniel's, but nowhere near as striking or alarming as Peake's. That tree though! Say what you like, Arthur Rackham couldn't half draw interesting trees.

Finally, now for something completely different. This is my copy of Ralph Steadman's illustration of the Cheshire Cat

Copying it helps you realise just how good Ralph Steadman is. His style looks chaotic, anarchic to first sight. It really isn't, though. There's some absolutely beautiful use of quite precise geometric shading here. In terms of my personal preference, this rivals Peake's at the top of my list.

Comparison - 3 Cheshire Cats

Right, if you were with me yesterday you’ll know I posted a copy of one of John Tenniel’s illustrations of the Cheshire Cat. I made the point that the Cheshire Cat illustrations really aren’t my favourite examples of Tenniel’s work. After that I made copies of a couple of other illustrations of said cat, for comparison.

This is my copy of Helen Oxenbury’s illustration of the Cheshire Cat. Helen Oxenbury won the 1999 Kate Greenaway medal for her illustrations for Alice in Wonderland. At first look you might be struck by the differences between her style and Tenniel’s. Helen Oxenbury’s Alice is a modern girl, and her illustrations are clean and unfussy. But if you look again, Alice and he cat are actualy in very similar positions to those they adopt in the Tenniel sketch. The cat is in the tree, on the rtop right of the illustration, Alice is to the bottom left, looking up, just like in Tenniel’s. Helen Oxenbury’s illustrations interpret Alice as a funny, slightly ridiculous, children’s tale, with none of the darkness of some other illustrations, and that’s a perfectly valid interpretation.

This is my copy of Mervyn Peake’s Cheshire Cat. Now, I have to say that this is my favourite. Peake’s Cheshire Cat is grinning, but those fangs and those demonic eyes convey he’s up to no good at all.

This is the Tenniel copy I posted yesterday.

Comparing Peake's and Tenniel's Alices -

 I made the point earlier that Peake’s Alice is very different to Tenniel’s, and so that made me think that I might be nice to actually copy one of Peake’s depictions of Alice herself. This is my copy of a sketch from Through the Looking Glass, after Alice has made it to the end of the board to earn promotion to queen. Looking specifically at the Alice figures, you can see that Tenniel’s archetypal Alice is a little girl, usually quite prim and well kempt. Comparing this with Peake’s Alice, she seems just a tiny bit older, her hair is a little more wild and a little darker than Tenniel’s blond Alice – you can see this better in some of the other illustrations Peake made.

As for the crown, it’s really interesting that in Tenniel’s illustration the queens all wear crowns which seem slightly exaggerated versions of a queen’s crown from a standard Staunton chess piece. Which in Peake’s illustration, Alice is wearing the kind of crown you’d see on an early Victorian chess piece, incredibly tall and elaborate.

With the red and white queens, I’m struck with the symmetry in the composition, despite the fact that the queens themselves are such different characters. I like this sketch even more if you look at it in context of the previous sketch, where the figures are in the same relationship to each other, but the queens are awake. It means that when you turn the page, you get a similar effect of turning the page to see Alice emerging from the looking glass, or to see the queen turning into the kitten, or to see the Cheshire Cat disappearing.

With Tenniel, especially with regards to the red queen, you don’t lose sight of the fact that she’s actually a chess piece, rather than a character with a life of her own, which is something I definitely do feel about the queens in the Peake illustration. I think Peake might well have had a thing about noses, too, for the red queen’s nose reminds me very much of the similar nose he gave to the Mad Hatter.

Comparison with Peake

Yesterday I copied Tenniel's illustration of Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

By way of comparison I sketched a copy of Mervyn Peake’s rendition of Tweedledum and Tweedledee this morning. Looking at it, I think it’s an interesting illustration (see what I did there?) of the similarities and differences between Tenniel’s renditions of the characters in the book, and Peake’s.

Like Tenniel, Peake shows the two as twins, with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Like Tenniel, Peake distinguishes between them through the names embroided on the collar – although this is actually specified in the description in Chapter IV of Through the Looking Glass”. So much for the similarities. I think it’s worth comparing the faces. In Tenniel’s illustration, although the pair are wearing schoolboy’s caps, they look like grownups. Back in the 70s and 80s the comic actor Terry Scott would often dress up as a schoolboy for comic effect – he had a novelty record called “My brother” a well. Well, the faces of Tenniel’s twins remind me of Terry Scott as a schoolboy. They don’t look like kids. While Peake’s twins really are a pair of cheeky urchins.

I do think that Tenniel’s static pair do fit Carroll’s description, “they stood so still that she quite forgot they were alive, and she was looking round to see if the word “TWEEDLE” was written at the back of each collar, when she was startled by a voice coming from the one marked ‘DUM’.

‘If you think we’re wax-works,” he said,”you ought to pay, you know” One other notable difference as well is the fact that Peake doesn't include Alice in this illustration, which is also true of the Mad Hatter and March Hare illustration that I copied last week. Peake's Alice is very different from Teniel's, her dark hair being one obvious difference.