Today marks the inauguration of
AlphaBooks, the new weekly challenge by
Ben Towle,
Andrew Neal &
Rich Barrett.
"AlphaBooks is the name of the game. We will be drawing ficitonal characters from books every week - one for each letter of the alphabet. On the first day (Monday, May 21), everyone will draw characters whose names start with the letter “A.” The following monday, we’ll draw characters whose names start with the letter “B.” And so on!"
I decided to do a series of illustrated letters whose only restriction is that the book has to be one that I have read, preferably one that I've loved. Of course my A had to be Alice! How appropriate that she came first, since the book is one of my earliest & longest-lasting obsessions-- I still love reading it to this day.
I first encountered
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as an audio recording when I had a series of blinding headaches at the age of six. My mom would put me to bed with a hot cloth over my eyes (the treatment our doctor prescribed), then put on Alice to keep me company. I would drift in & out of a semi-hallucinatory state (which I now know to be a feature of migraines), absorbing Lewis Carroll's astonishing story. Painful as it was, it was a curiously appropriate way to experience Alice...
When deciding which scene to illustrate, I thought of Illustration Friday's prompt "sight" & remembered Alice's first sight of the garden, through the tiny hidden door. There are 3 "A"s in the picture... do you see them? (Click the image for a closer view.)
Acrylic on text scanned from a 1946 Random house edition given me by my dear friend Nat, ~5"x8"
