Page 112 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 112/206
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll): original drawing for Alice (left) + John Tenniel: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Alice in Wonderland) 1865
Dodgson’s original hand-written text of Alice was also illustrated with his own drawings (left), but he eventually chose the professional illustrator John Tenniel to create the art for the printed book. Tenniel was perhaps influenced a little by J. J. Grandville whose l’Autre Monde (1844) contained many illustrations treated with the same sense of fantasy and anthropomorphism as Tenniel’s engraved illustrations, and Dodgson’s original drawings.
You can see how (above) Tenniel adapted, expanded, interpreted, and embellished Dodgson’s original pictorial ideas, adding contextual detail, a sense of drama, and a pictorial coherency to his meticulous illustrations. And look at the sheet of heavily worked pencil studies (next page),that show a stage in Tenniel’s creative method where he is fleshing-out the Alice figure into a more three-dimensional character, and experimenting with his anthropomorphism (lower left). Note the use of white gouache to highlight forms and to block unnecessary detail. The Parrot ‘judge advocate’ and his companion are the object of Alice’s gaze. (Image courtesy from Houghton Library, Harvard University). Note that Tenniel adds his signature/logotype to even his working drawings (lower right).