By Brigette Barrager
2019
Medium: Pencil and Photoshop
Alice’s Wonderland Bakery
This wonderful, whimsical character design assignment arrived in my inbox like a Cheshire cat materializing in a tumtum tree.
The direction was to redesign Alice from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland aimed at a preschool audience. In this version, she would be a baker, cooking up magical nonsense treats in Wonderland. The Disney version of Alice in Wonderland remains one of my favorite animated films, not only because I love the books it was based on, but because Mary Blair’s artistic influence is so vividly felt in it. (If you want to know more about my affinity for Mary, please check out Pocket Full of Colors.) I was encouraged to use Mary’s own designs of Alice for that film as reference for this new version, and I took that direction and ran with it! I could have done one hundred versions of Alice in various chef apparel. It is one of those assignments that felt absolutely tailor-made for me. I also threw in a couple of Dinahs because how could I not?
I did my first versions on paper with pencil, scanned them, and then redrew them in Photoshop. My initial pencil sketches showcase my scatterbrained thought process – jumping from one idea to the next in no particular order.
Ultimately, as is often the case, my designs were part of a first round of preliminary drawings that perhaps influenced the final outcome, but none of them was “it”. I’ll let you be the judge of whether my version of Alice inspired the final.
All visual work on this page is property of Disney.
