While I did actually do some concept sketches, I actually decided to go with a very last minute idea that only popped up in my head once I opened up Photoshop to set up the document for the illustrations. But don't worry though, I will post up the sketches later on when I write up on the interior illustrations.
This was something I doodled out quite a few years back with a pink pen and Copic marker while listening to Pogo's Alice remix. And while I was never truly able to impress my tutors with any of my works back in my previous college (Because face it, I had a long way to go as compared to most of my classmates at the time), one of my tutors pointed out the potential in this piece, and that I merely needed to improve on its composition.
While some might consider this to be a rather feminine colour choice, I felt that it was not only striking (Which is important in hopes of getting any potential reader's attention) but also suited Wonderland's colourful (See what I did there?) and fun atmosphere, without having to even resort to a wide spectrum of colours. Of course to make Alice stand out, the blue is used as a spot colour of sorts to make her stand out.
The overall idea for the book cover's design was a rather simple contemporary piece of our heroine Alice, as she makes her way down a messy mountain composed of various objects that represent key scenes and other key characters (It definitely saved me time on redesigning the other characters too, though I still will have to do that for the 2 interior illustrations...).
As I planned to put the title at the bottom, it only makes sense to place Alice at the very top. I had so much fun designing her dress, which is mixture of various designs from past incarnations, and I can't wait to draw it again in the interior illustrations.
I started doodling in the objects next, trying to figure out what key items should be included as I did, such as the teapot, the hookah, pocket watch, etc. I initially want to add in a part of the sea, which I felt wasn't focused on as often as other parts of the story (Such as the tea party, the queen's court, etc.), but with the limited colour palette, I was not able to make it stand out properly, nor blend in as well as other objects, and so scrapped the idea (As you can see above, there were some rough lines for splashing water on the bottom right, just above the cards).
The hookah was possibly the most difficult thing to draw, while I initially want to draw in a more detailed one as compared to the one seen in the original illustration, I soon felt that it looked completely unrecognisable (It looked like one of those ring toys) and so reverted to the more simplistically shaped one.
I decided to add a bit of shading to the large mountain of objects, but it really did not matter whether all of them could be clearly identified from one another, so as long as Alice remained the focus point of the entire piece.
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