Beyond Wonderland

Original size 11x8.5 © 2012 Alex Ledante

I've been meaning to do some Alice themed works for a while and finally got this one finished. Never one to be satisfied with low hanging fruit, I wanted my Tweedledum & Tweedledee to have a unique design... Equally important was to have Alice being menaced but somehow able to survive the encounter

Original size 11x8.5 © 2012 Alex Ledante

If you haven't read Behind the Looking Glass, then you might not be aware of the chess symbolism in the book. Assuming you can follow my rant, I want to talk about paired rooks, since Tweedledee and Tweedledum are in fact doubled rooks. Because I used to bring my queen out too early, I often lost her and had to rely mostly on my rooks to win. I still think that paired rooks can beat a queen but at that point Alice was merely a pawn, so it was red player's game to lose (which she did)

So when I wanted to do an Alice piece, it was essential to do justice to Tweedledee and Tweedledum; not to portray them as the nimrods you're used to but as the truly formidable opponents they are. Now that I have the skill to satisfy my inner texture whore, I can really show you the masks that I've always known they wear. That having been said, I did follow the convention of having Tweedledum be the less intelligent of the pair and indicated this with the childish mask. To be fair, I have also made him twelve feet tall as opposed to Tweedledee's modest nine foot stature

There is an amusing interaction between the two in both pieces but ultimately rooks are brute force, so this portrayal is more accurate than what you've seen before. I suppose it would be natural to think of them as nimrods but only if you've never faced paired rooks; then you'd know they were a force to be reckoned with and see how they have been maligned over the years

Mostly this is about me being a texture whore, since this is the sort of thing I've always wanted to do but never had the skill to do in traditonal media but now I can finally show you what I've seen in my head for all these years- a triumph of the will!