Home| Executive | News | Events | Links | Recipes | Comic | Lexicon| Rants


Peter Pan:
Pencil Sketches
by Kari Maaren

Around Christmas of 2009, a friend asked me for some illustrations for a poetry collection she was working on; the subject was Peter Pan. I got inspired and did a number of sketches, some more successful than others. Ultimately, the friend went with a professional artist for her collection. Since the collection has recently been published, I guess the sketches are all mine again. They are homeless, alas, having no poetry to cling to, but I thought I would display them here, just because I could. They are not in my usual comic-strip style. The eight sketches reproduced below do not constitute all the sketches I made on this subject, but they are the ones that don't make me cringe to look at. (There were some misfires.)



1) Wendy Shot by Lost Boys

This was one of the first ones I drew, I think.

[Image description: pencil sketch of a girl in a semi-transparent nightgown. She has apparently been shot through the heart with an arrow, though if you look closely, you can see that the arrow has hit the pendant dangling from her necklace. She is in the process of falling to the ground.]
2) Wendy Sitting

It was while I was doing this sketch that I decided to make Wendy's nightgown progressively more and more tattered.

[Image description: pencil sketch of a girl in a tattered nightgown. We are looking at her from the back as she crouches on the ground.]
3) Peter and Wendy

This would probably have been on the title page,though it really comes later in the sequence of images (you can tell by the state of Wendy's nightgown).

[Image description: pencil sketch of a girl in a tattered nightgown. We are again looking at her from the back, but this time, she is gazing up at a boy floating in the sky. He is mostly naked, though he wears fur or leaves as a loincloth. He is carrying a knife..]
4) Mr and Mrs Darling

This sketch was originally attached to a poem about Mrs Darling as Mr Darling's shadow.

[Image description: pencil sketch of proper-looking middle-aged man in trousers and a waistcoat. He stands beside a wall, drinking a cup of tea. His shadow, which appears on the wall behind him, appears to be of a woman in a long dress.]
5) Lost Boy

This nameless Lost Boy just sort of happened.

[Image description: pencil sketch of a boy in a fur tunic and boots. He has long, messy hair, and he is carrying a spear.]
6) Tinkerbell

This was my first idea of what Tinkerbell would look like. Terrible things happened to the background, but I did kind of like the "wings."

[Image description: pencil sketch of a tiny feral-looking fairy dressed in a single leaf. She crouches on the ground, her wings a blur behind her. She barely has a face.]
7) Tinkerbell Hunting

This later version of Tink was a bit cleaner but still had the hair and the wings. I didn't want to give her a proper face.

[Image description: pencil sketch of the same fairy. This time, she is holding a spear and preparing to leap at the viewer.]
8) Wendy in Moonlight

It may not have worked out perfectly, but at least I got to press my pencil down on the paper really, really hard. It's hard to see in this tiny copy, but Wendy's nightgown is moderately tattered here.

[Image description: pencil sketch of a girl standing on a cliff's edge at night as she gazes out over the moonlit landscape.]

Images copyright Kari Maaren 2009-2010