Getting lost in Wonderland

Greetings my dear readers! I’d like to share another book cover illustration project I worked on the past few days, this time for an old time favourite, Alice in Wonderland!

Jul 10, 2024

Hello, and welcome to Greetings from Somewhere in the Wild! I’m Ine Beerten and I’m an artist and nomad, originally from Belgium. Usually you can find me in a wild place somewhere in the world but currently I’m back in Belgium recovering from a knee fracture. However I’ll be back on the road later this year, in the mean time, please subscribe if you’d like to receive my illustration explorations in your mailbox!

Hello everybody!

It’s been a busy but fun week! For the first time I met up in real life with another Substacker, Candace from Dandelion Seeds: Illustrated Essays! It was so wonderful to chat about illustration, travel, moving to other countries and of course about Substack too - we both agreed that we love Substack but that it can get overwhelming on the platform because there is simply too much amazing content and it’s impossible to read everything!

And I’ve been working very hard on another book cover, this time for Alice in Wonderland. I’ll share everything about it below!

Inspiration by mail

I told myself I was going to focus on client work last week, but then I received another prompt of Jehane’s Golden Thread, this time it was Alice in Wonderland, and I just couldn’t not create anything for it! I’ve loved the story and its characters for a long time.

There can never be too much muchness!

I decided right away I’d go for a maximalist approach, adding in as many characters and moments of the story as I could and using a deep dark teal background colour to make the bright colours of the characters pop.

The sketch

I made a very rough sketch first of what I wanted the cover to look like. You will see that I did change a few things in the final piece…

And here’s the result

I knew this was not going to be a quick project with all the detail I wanted to add, but it still took me a bit longer than I expected. I’m at the point now that I’m calling it finished even though the perfectionist in me still thinks there are a few things that could have been done better. But since this is just a portfolio project I’m not getting paid for I think I’m happy at leaving it as it is though! There are parts that I’m also super happy about so overall I think it turned out great!