For a long time I’ve considered removing the bits and pieces of drawings I’ve upload to this website. I put them up here, less as a show case for my talents, but more as a place to manage, archive and possible share them.
I don’t really consider myself an artist and I’ve allow my skills and little talent to languish for a long time. Sometimes I pick up some pencils and draw (such as scenes of Chargey, a holiday home we go to in the summer), but I never produce anything in my opinion of quality.
This morning, I check my blog and find this “lovely” comment on an image I did quite a while back:
“This was plagiarized from a 1 19th century etching. You’re a hack.”
He’s right about one thing. I did “copy” the image of the Jabberwocky (off the wonderful classic John Tennial Alice in Wonderland illustrations). I did a whole rack of “copies” (and original stuff) based on Alice in Wonderland as decorations for my wedding, oh so long ago.
I never thought that anyone would take my drawings seriously enough to accuse me of a plagiarism! I’ve since updated any other “copies” that I’ve done with a note about the original work in case that I potentially get accused of being a plagiarist again. I don’t make money of these images.
It just drove home that perhaps it’s time to cut the images from my website. They only get hits from trolls and wandering surfers. They don’t increase traffic or readership of my website. To those who read my blog, do you want to see my artistic “hacks”?
I just discovered, via Boing Boing, that today is the birth date of Alice Liddell. If you didn’t know, Alice Liddell was the inspiration for the Alice character in Alice in Wonderland.
So to celebrate this, here are some funky Alice in Wonderland links.
The strange tale of how Alice in Wonderland arrived in the Soviet Union
TextArc is an interesting web experiment at visualising a book. and they’ve used Alice in Wonderland as an example!
I’m a bit of Alice-in-Wonderland-o-phile, so imagine my joy when my daughter (called Alice) was given a DVD called “Alice through the looking glass”. Now it looks absolutely terrible from the cover. But then I looked at the voice actors… Mr. T as the Jabberwocky! Wow. (You know I don’t recall the Jabberwocky actually talking in the original books).
Anyway, last Saturday morning, Alice decides she’ll watch it and that it no longer has a scary cover. We sit down and start watching. It’s bad. Very bad. The songs are atrocity and the rewriting of the original story is so hacky and obviously designed to fit into some “good for kids” formula. The animation is on the lame side of the 80s. It’s so bad, I fall asleep within ten minutes after the introduction of the “fool” (a character certainly not in the books). I only woke up at the end credits. Darn, I never even got to hear Mr. T as the Jabberwocky.
But I’m not willing to sit through it again… (but I may have to…)
(You can see the original DVD on Amazon(.co.uk) here)
This theme is a clear three column view with a useful toolbar on top. It has support for easy customisation (per category, author and whole site).
This theme is originally a conversion of my site when moving from a MovableType setup to Wordpress. Because of that I added a lot of extra functionality into the theme but don’t worry, it’ll work out of the box on a new system without any plugins. (If your interested in the code, most of it is in “tdo-functions.php”).
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A short story about a girl called Alice who finds herself in a strange school in the land of dreams.
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