Moss Piglet (July 2025):
Alice in Wonderland
Hey, hey, it's time for another set of submissions I made a few months ago to "Moss Piglet", a small art magazine out of Kenosha, Wisconsin which I've been contributing to for the past few years. They use a monthly theme for it's publication and this time it was "Alice in Wonderland". A little bit of a stretch from my usual fare on the Blog, but it still sort of works. Kinda.
This one was a bit of a cheat, as it was originally a 12" x 16" Acrylic Painting, "Alice, Illuminated", I did for a friend, as she was a HUGE fan of the books. She was gifted the original, but I had scanned it in full size and went back in Rebelle 7 and digitally fixed some of the things that bothered me and other assorted digital chicanery.
I have a soft spot (both in my heart and my head) for "Alice in Wonderland". When I was a child, I used to pore over the madcap drawings of Sir John Tenniel and read random passages here and there. I wanted to do up a half-dozen or so submissions to "Moss Piglet", but I was absolutely swamped with other projects at the time. Ah, well, I can still work on some of those ideas at a later time. In fact, I have an appropriately insane project using "Alice in Wonderland" that I am planning on doing later this year/early next year. We'll see how that goes.
I will also be posting the second submission from the "Alice in Wonderland" issue tomorrow, as it coincidentally works for the celebration of Labor Day (no pun intended for "works" and Labor Day in the same sentence, but I'll pretend I did).
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STEP ONE: As it just so happens, I have some of the "Work in Progress" from a while back as I was making this painting and figure I'd give a behind the scenes as to how this came together. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to think of something that my friend would appreciate and fell upon the idea of "Alice, Illuminated", done up in a saintly, beatific manner. This was among the first, very rough layout sketch that I did in ArtStudio Pro on my iPad. You can see that I had an idea of other items swirling around, but jettisoned those for the most part as it was just too busy. As I said, it was a first go at translating the idea into an actuality, so it a bit crude and quickly scrawled.
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STEP TWO: Here's the drawing I did in Clip Studio Paint. I believe I printed it out and used carbon paper to transfer the image to a gessoed, 100% cotton watercolor paper (#140) I had glued to the 12" x 16" masonite.
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STEP THREE: And here's the finished Acrylic painting. The scanner was a bit harsh with some of the colors not showing as blended as they were, but that happens when comparing the original with the scan, of course.
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STEP FOUR: And here is the digitally sweetened version I did for "Moss Piglet". I was able to fix some of the minor things that didn't work out in the painting. I did have to change the aspect ratio a little bit to fit the format of the "Moss Piglet" magazine, hence the extra space above her head. I think I'll also have to add the clouds back in on the finished print.
I am mostly done digitally updating the painting in Rebelle and hope to release it as a print if people are interested. Updates toward the end of September.
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Done traditionally in Acrylic, then worked over digitally in Rebelle. So, I dunno, Tra-Digital, since it's both Traditional and Digital?
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