On Shoes and Ships and Sealing-Wax: April 2022

Saturday, April 30, 2022

On "Disney Alice in Wonderland 70th Art by Mary Blair Sketch Book": A Book Review

Title: Disney Alice in Wonderland 70 Art by Mary Blair Sketch Book
Genre: Art

About the book...
Created in honor of the 70th anniversary of Alice in Wonderland (1951), this book is a collection of artwork pertaining to the film, ranging from concept art, model sheets, and still images, accompanied by pages to color and blank pages to try your hand at doing your own sketches.

What I think...

This is an incredible book! The prints are beautiful and some of the artwork included is in plastic pockets, so, if you really wanted to, you could frame them. It also has a decent amount of fold outs allowing for some of the lovely details to be better appreciated.

The pages themselves are great quality with some having a nice texture to them (love how some of the images from the movie are glossy while the concept art on the same page are matte!). I love getting to see the different artwork behind the movie, how it progressed from the concept art, and I adore that they included facsimiles of model sheets, which I always enjoy looking at.

I was a little surprised at it being an actual sketchbook and not just artwork from the archives and sketches that were used for the film. I think, though, having fine tuned my drawing skills as a child copying images from Disney storybooks freehand, the idea for Disney to create a sketch book of this sort was a great one!

My only minor disappointment with this book was that while it begins with a written portion about Blair and her role with Disney, it is a very short and very basic. It would have been nice for this part to have been a little bit longer and provide more detail, but, overall, it didn't detract much from this wonderful book!