Alice in wonderland
A pop-up book
Alice in Wonderland pop-up is the last project I did when I studied in la Massana school
of arts and crafts in Barcelona. In this project I collaborated with Jesús
Planagumà, who did the grafic design. For the back pages he worked on diferent
printed papers being insipred by William Morris’ designs (Morris was a contemporary
of Carroll). The wall of the title page is a good exemple of Planagumà’s work
as well.
This pop-up opens creating a 90º angle. The original project consists
on 6 different pages or scenes, at the moment I’ve done 3 of them plus the
cover and the packaging. I expect that some editor will show interest in the
project, then I’m going to finish it.
The first thing I do when starting a new page is to make a model. It’s
a really simple model but it works well for me because I have the opportunity
to see how the mechanisms should work when opening or shutting the scenes.
After the model I work on the diferent levels of the page, trying to provide
certain depth.
When working on the illustrations I always follow the same routines:
characters’ design, sketches... All illustrations have been done with water
colours, some pencil and guaix as well.
Conceptually I always try to explain something more in my
illustrations, always in a symbolic way. I want to add something more to
Carroll’s narration. For instance, let’s have a look at the page with the
caterpillar. I’ve drawn it as if it was some kind of guru. I interpreted that
the caterpillar talked about the effects of some drugs. Remember that Alice
changes her size and shape after having certain substances: “I - I hardly know,
Sir, just at present - at least I Know who I was when I got up this morning,
but I think I must have been changed several times since then.” It seems that
Alice doesn’t remember who she is, because drugs have changed her mind. So in
the illustration I drawed several plants, all of them used as drugs: cocaine,
opium, peyote... Another exemple of my contributions to the work are shown at
the Mad tea party. The characters talk about time and how they’ve killed time
in this scene. So I drew different types of clocks and other time references.
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