by Lynn Murphy

Created on: July 29, 2008

As an art teacher I often include my love of literature with my lesson plans, and one of the works I like to incorporate is Alice In Wonderland. Why? What could be more fun to draw? You have a crazy, wonderful, fantastical world with interesting characters which can only be reached by falling down a rabbit hole and successfully completing several challenges. It inspires the imagination to run wild. It offers a whole world of interpretation.

Unfortunately, when an artist starts out to draw Alice in Wonderland he or she meets with a huge barrier up front. If you know the story, that is not the obstacle, The obstacle is Disney. Most grown=ups and children alike have a Disney-icon images of Alice and her cohorts in the land beyond the rabbit hole and it is difficult to get beyond that image. We want the inquisitive Alice to be wearing a blue dress and a white pinafore. We want the cheshire cat to be a loud pink and purple stripe and Tweedle Dum and Tweedle dee to have orange curls and big stripey ties and the little caps with propellers on them. The images are ingrained in our minds from childhood.

The other reference we have is the classic black and white illustrations in the Lewis Carroll books. However, in drawing Wonderland, we need to actually READ the story. Hear in our mind's ear the clever phrases and eloquent descriptions. We need, as artists, to decide for ourselves what the characters look like, what they are wearing, what their surroundings look like. Try to picture the lizard Little Bill, the door mouse in his teacup, the outfit of the queen of hearts. What would the caterpillar, surrounded by a hooka-smoke induced cloud look like? What exactly is a mock turtle, a gryphon or a lobster-quadrille?

Then the creativity should take hold. Only after re-reading the original words as Carroll wrote them can you move past the stylized images we associate with Alice. Draw the characters as you would any other subject. Draw using your imagination, remembering all the while that this after all a dreamland, brillig as it were. Apply brilliant color and charming settings. Read the poetry and try to see it in your mind's eye. Alice can have long golden hair, but who's to say she must wear blue? Must the Queen of Hearts be fat and ugly? Can't you just see the courtroom scene? The moment when Alice first sees the rabbit? Draw it as you thought it looked as you read it the first time. Forget what the big screen or the television screen made it. And when drawing Alice in Wonderland, above all make it wonderful.

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