For once this won’t be a huge diary entry with videos and costume stills, its all about one simple picture that was probably one of the easiest and most carefree shots I have taken in such a long, long time…… and one that I love dearly. Its funny because looking back over the series some of my favourites are very different to the ones that the public react to, I suppose I tend to connect a great deal to the type of day it was, and how the picture came together as well as the final visual. It would be true to say in a silly way I’m always the most proud of the pictures that require the bare minimum of editing. So for me, when I get a picture almost spot-on straight out the camera (as in this case) I feel like I’ve progressed somehow, even though the truth of it is pretty much down to luck on the day.

Anyway, I have been sitting on this shot since August 2011, and finally releasing it now feels like a pressure valve being slowly undone. You see this picture marks the beginning of the end….. it represents Katie’s journey towards the final scenes of the Wonderland, and will very soon lead you (the viewer), to a very beautiful shoot I have been waiting to share for over a year now. Reaching that point will mean I am finally up to date  and can at long last create the final 4 big scenes.  The symbolism in this picture is quite a coincidence because it was intended to lead us away from the darkness of the more recent pictures, by representing Katie’s journey into the light, and yet at the same time ironically mirrors my current situation in real life. For the first time in almost 3 years the end of the series is in sight… my life has changed dramatically after leaving my career in fashion behind, and now for the first time since the project began I am meeting with people to discuss how the series will be brought out of the computer and into real life. So many things have been happening, and as scared as I’ve been, the reaction of people towards the pictures has been overwhelming.  It was only 2 months ago that I sat down and put the entire series (to date) together into a beautiful presentation book to take to meetings – it was my first taste of seeing each picture side by side as it would appear in the finished Wonderland book. It has been emotional, exciting and terrifying all at once, but the main thing is I now believe in it all more than ever before. I defy anyone not to love the colours and fall into the worlds created across each page – for me I can remember every last exhausted moment, every nerve ending, everything that went wrong, but also every moment of unexpected joy and surprise. I could almost taste the rain, feel the wind and the warmth of those unexpected moments of sun that appeared as if by magic when I thought all was lost. Its been such an extraordinary journey, and to know that it will finally end this summer is going to be such an incredible relief and outpouring for me. The truth is I’ve been unwell for almost the entire series, and I think the relentless pressure of having to constantly create bigger and bigger scenes with no idea or experience in how to do so, has been deeply draining. I feel like I’m slowing down now, like there’s not much left, but each time I experience someone new witnessing the pictures for the first time in a meeting, a little spark ignites again, and I know I’ll somehow drag myself to the end.

So this is it…. ” The Distant Pull of Remembrance ” It was shot just after the dawn and was literally just me, Katie and my husband Matt.  There was no-one else to help, even Elbie couldn’t come, so I had to do the body painting, hair and make-up myself ! In a way I’m so glad the picture was this pure, it represents everything I wanted it to be …. there is such a freshness and release after all the big heavy costumes and darkness that has preceded it. This was about letting go, and you will discover the colour yellow has a very important significance.
The wings were made by me and apart from the smoke, nature did the rest – Katie’s body paint was actually wet mud I poured down her back from the soil at our feet, and the sun lit up the yellow haze before us as it rose steadily over our heads in a perfect arc. It was simple, happy and reminded me of the very beginning of the series, and the sense that the circle was completing…. its funny, even typing these words  feels like taking another little step down, away from all the stress … I’m getting there, slowly… slowly ….

So to finish here are the behind the scenes pictures – once again I forgot about being seen behind the camera and  had just grabbed my old track suit top and shoved a pin in my unbrushed hair (It was the dawn to be fair) ! One day I promise to try and make an effort for a photo, and maybe even show my face again :)

‘The Fall of Gammelyn’

‘The Puppetry of Fools’

‘The Thousand Empty Days of a Frozen Heart’

‘A Floral Birth’

‘The Coronation of Gammelyn’

Once again this is a bit of an epic diary entry, and is the sum of about 4 months of work. I have cut back the ‘making of’ and the behind the scenes pictures to the bare minimum, and tried to squish what remains into story boards of how everything came together, but nonetheless there’s a lot to get through. The mini series of King Gammelyn was photographed in the late summer of 2011 and then the snow and early spring of 2012. I started the costume in August 2011 and shot the order back to front, so I could add more flowers to the outfit between scenes, until I finished it in its final ‘over-grown’ state in March.  Before I go any further for those of you who can’t face reading all my waffle, here is a video of some behind the scenes clips and the finished costume detail shots.

** Sadly I have to say that for some reason Vimeo completely desaturates this videos colour on mac’s, so please treat this a glimpse of what happened, and view the finished pictures in the main gallery on this website. We tried for a week to resolve it, but it seems its a common problem with Vimeo and there nothing we can do about it.

and the props ……….

 The whole concept and creation of Gammelyn has been a huge challenge and really took me out of my comfort zone, it was the first time I have ever introduced  a male character to the series and the first time I have used two models as ‘one person’. It was also the first time I have stretched an idea across a number of seasons, as well as develop a costume throughout the whole process, rather than just keeping it the same. So it has been a big learning curve, and a situation I never expected to be in, but now its over I’m very glad it happened ….. and the reason all of this began? Well its all because of one rather remarkable man….. Tim Andrews.

Tim wrote to me almost two years ago in June 2010, he was a complete stranger and wanted to know if I would consider taking his picture. My initial reaction was I had no time and was up to my neck in Wonderland, but as I read further into his email he hooked me with his story. Some of you may already recognise Tim’s name by now, as over the last few years he has been photographed by many well known photographers including Rankin, Danielle Tunstall, Miss Anelia, Rosie Hardy and Laurence Winram. In fact, the total number is now up to 180, and Tim and his project ‘Over The Hill’ has been featured many times in the media, including this overview here on the BBC’s culture show

The thing about Tim is that he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2005, and had to give up his job as a city lawyer as he could no longer work. Some people may have seen this as a time to retreat and take life more gently, but instead what followed for Tim has been an extraordinary roller coaster of possibility. Tim decided to make life an adventure and has spent the last few years handing himself over to artists to ‘do what they wish’ with him, to be captured, nude, clothed, indoors outdoors, as strong, vulnerable, you name it, it has been done.  He has been quoted as saying he’s ‘never been happier’ in the sense he now has complete freedom to do whatever he wishes. He has embraced this artistic journey and for me is someone we could all learn a thing or two from. So here was a challenge, and I was intrigued, I admired Tim for his spirit and energy and wanted to be involved. However, the only way I could find time to shoot him was to make Tim a part of Wonderland, and that meant creating a very special character, and waiting over 15 months for the right point in the series.

From the offset I already knew there could only be one possible reason to introduce him into the project, and that was to give Wonderland its King.   It was going to be tricky seeing as the series was awash with beautiful girls, flowers and butterflies……It would be a fine line creating a suitable male who could rule these elements, without looking like a pantomime prince. I wanted to develop an idea that gave the character integrity, and at the same time commented on Tim’s real life situation in an underlying way. What costume could I make for a king that wasn’t the same old crown and cloak seen in every storybook across the land? Luckily I had over a year to think about this idea, as I wanted the King to enter in the final stages of the series, at the point where the White Queen and her key had arrived. I saw his character as someone who ruled the natural forces in Wonderland, but was also a part of it – almost half human, born from the very elements that he controlled. I had recently watched the film ‘The Fountain’ and when I saw the death of the lead character Tomas, everything fell into place.

In the film the Tomas drinks sap from the Tree of Life hoping it will give him eternal youth and return his dead wife. Instead his body is overtaken and explodes with flowers and grass ravaging his flesh until he collapses, returning to the ground and the very essence from which he came.  It was the reverse of this concept that really set me off – a king born from flowers, woken from a 100 year sleep, overgrown with roots and vines, becoming a young man, and eventually human. I love the tragedy in some fairytales, how vanity can be the downfall of a character, or how the wish to become human often ends in sadness. So the frame work of this imagined ‘life’ began, one born from beauty to end in tragedy, a sense of seasons and time passing, and with it the death of its surrounding flora and colours. Ultimately I decided the costume had to be made almost entirely from flowers, but all of them had to be uniform in colour and tone as it was not about their individual beauty – it was about them being the very fabric of the Kings body. I cannot even begin to guess how many flowers I used for the costume but it was literally hundreds, and every single one had to be individually sprayed 3 different shades of black, blue and white to create depth and highlight. It was a lot of work and I lost count of how much spray paint I got through.
The colours and loose appearance of the King once again came from the illustrations of my favourite childhood storybook ‘Moonlight and Fairyland’. I have never mentioned it before, but this book is the main reason so many of my pictures are within the palette of midnight blues, purples and lilacs. Pauline Martins illustrations made such an impression on me that they are the colours I have always associated with magic I guess. So you will recognise a connection with this image in the colours,  flowers, clothes and the long curled hair of my King.

Making the costume

Making the Kings skirt took the longest – I had to hand paint the design, over dye the fabric to give it a washed out appearance, fuse the silk to canvas, make the drawstring waist, decorate it with antique bells and attach the fake flowers to the under-layer.

The crown took 8 solid days to make and was made up of hundreds of individual petals which were graded in colour and size, hand stitched and glued into place, and finally sealed with enamel.

Elbie worked up the wig for Tim’s shoot and then I added levels of flowers between pictures for the young king

My greatest challenge was learning how to use resin. Sometimes I have to force myself to learn new things in order to achieve the look I’m after and this was the first time I have ever attempted to use the medium. After discovering you simply cannot buy  false icicles that look remotely convincing anywhere, I faced the fact I would have to make my own. In the end I managed to make icicles, sheet ice, and even ‘crushed ice’ to finish my frozen galleon with. It took a lot of patience, and my first attempts were an absolute disaster. The house smelt like a toxic waste dump for 2 weeks, but it was worth it in the end. I felt pretty proud of myself for persevering and eventually getting what I needed :)

Once I had set my heart on creating the snow scene, I realised I would never be able to make my own icicles large enough to create any kind of impact in a big picture. After endless searching for solutions, I found a special effects scenery maker who could produce  huge sheets of plastic icicles at a price I could just about afford. They were incredibly basic, just vac-packed clear plastic, but once I had cut then out and painted them, the effect was pretty good!

Finished painted scenery

So that was all the background work, and the costume and props made. The first shoot was Tim’s half of the character. It was the 26^th of September and the summer was almost over, Tim arrived at my house on the day and it was the first time I had met him in person. I suppose I had been so focused on creating the character and the costume, that I had never actually taken the time to consider the matter of Tim’s condition.  My plans were not exactly easy for him, one involved digging him into the side of a deep pit in the woods, and the other was to tie him to a giant puppet cross piece hanging from a tree. When I showed him the costume I noticed him shaking and began to worry my plans might have been a bit too adventurous. I think at this point both myself and Tim found ourselves in a situation where either of us could have decided to simplify the concepts for the comfort of the other, but in the end we just went for it, and I’m so very glad we did.

The first scene was Tim’s close up, I had discovered a deep pit in my local woods that had fine tree roots dangling through the soil along its edge. I wanted to embed and tangle Tim into them – the idea of him living an underworld existence beneath the surface really appealed to me, and echoed the characters connection with the surroundings from which he was brought to life.  Visually I had been fascinated by the design of the  Davy Jones crew  from the Pirates of the Caribbean Dead Man’s Chest film . The way the men had been integrated and overgrown with sea organisms was something that really stuck in my head. In my own little way I wanted to attempt this mood with Tim, he was extremely patient while I threaded the roots through his wig, shook dirt over his clothes and sprayed highlights of lilac over them to give a 3D effect.  After much fiddling, dust and spiders, we were ready. I had talked to Tim about how his part was the tragedy, I wanted the picture to be emotional, even though he was wearing such a bizarre costume. Again it was one of those moments where maybe it was a whole bunch of subconscious things coming together at once, but when I looked through the viewfinder Tim was utterly believable, the sadness in his eyes, exaggerated by the make-up was something I wasn’t prepared for. The scene fell quiet and I took my time, both of us were very close to each other, pushed up against the edge of the pit but it was strangely comforting to me. Tim was without doubt my vision of the King, and felt like an old friend despite only just meeting him. I deliberately shot the picture from a lower perspective to give the same enforced sense of respect and importance often seen in historical royal portraiture, and he did extremely well considering how awkward and uncomfortable his position was. Once I felt the picture had been captured and was about to pack up, a slightly eerie coincidence happened that took the portrait to a different level for me. It had been cloudy most of the morning and suddenly the sun came out and cast a shadow that ran  from Tim’s eye in a perfect track down across his cheek. It was strange because earlier I had planned for Elbe to paint a tear streak on Tim’s face, but at the last minute I worried it would look too contrived and decided against it. The shadow was more of a suggestion than a literal tear, but the effect was haunting and it sealed the atmosphere in an instant.

Next came the final scene, for which I planned to shoot Tim as broken puppet. I have never to this day spoken to Tim about my reason for doing this because I didn’t want him to approach the idea with any preconceptions. It was intended as a mixture of his reality, and the life of the character together. The cross piece was a metaphor for Tim’s Parkinson’s and the way it will sometimes take control of his body no matter how strong his will is, and secondly it was a dark twist to the idea of his character finally becoming a human man. This being that despite his apparent transition, he was still no more than a puppet controlled by the trees that towered over him and the very undergrowth from which he originally came .
At first I expected the scene to be in colour, and brushed lilac powder over the branches and vines, as well as at his feet. But in the end it felt more final that the image was colourless and like an old photograph.  Tim had coped well throughout a tiring day, but I had spent too long on the portrait and setting up the crosspiece had taken longer than expected. The light was fading and I could see he was feeling the pressure to get the picture, and that was when his tremors really took hold.  I had been in such a whirlwind that I guess this was the first time I fully appreciated how infuriating Parkinson’s disease must be. Tim was clearly incensed at his body’s refusal to stop no matter how hard he willed it to, and it was almost too poignant that this had happened at the very moment he had been tied to the crosspiece.  I could see how stressful it was, and was desperate for him to not worry about me and just know I felt honoured he had approached me to be part of his project. Tim is 6.2ft and is a strong, clever man who was obviously now just fed up at this momentary lapse so we took a break, and then with one last desperate attempt we managed to just scrape the picture before the light was gone. Later when we were home Tim told me how he had managed to overcome the situation, he said he’d imagined my mother had been there beside him telling him it would be alright and to pull himself together. This moved me so much, to think all I had been worried about was Tim, and yet from his perspective, he had been looking back at me thinking about how important the picture was because it was in memory of my mother. I suppose both of us had been through some dreadful things in the last few years and I was deeply touched by what he had said.  My only real regret about the day was that I didn’t have any time to get to know Tim better. He turned up, got through an exhausting day, and had to leave without us having a proper chat. We stay in touch via email now and I am slowly learning backwards about the things he has done, sometimes it never ceases to amaze me the people Wonderland has brought into my life and Tim is certainly no exception. I look forward to the day when I see him again and meet his family when Wonderland finally becomes an exhibition. To have all these people and memories under one roof will be an amazing moment, that’s for sure.

Anyway on to the last two shoots and for this I have to thank my long suffering and trusty assistant Adam, who has been helping me with Wonderland since the beginning of 2010. Adams part was to play the young king, but I wanted to make sure that his part remained relatively anonymous and did not take anything away from the fact the character was created for Tim.  Adam has seen the things I’ve done to my models over the years and so it was a relief to just shoot him and boss him around with no worries about how crazy the results were going to be! So Adam accepted his fate and prepared to be half frozen to death in the snow.

I wont go on about these shoots as I have already written too much; but they could not have been more different. The snow shoot was incredibly hard work, there were no poignant moments, no precious emotional connections … it was just incredibly stressful from the moment I woke up, to the time we got back that night. I had been obsessed with shooting the King in the snow and had even gone to the lengths of making giant icicle scenery in case the snow didn’t arrive and I would have to build a fake set. I had worked for days on my own making the props outside in minus temperatures, but when the snow came I wasn’t ready and was devastated when it melted in 2 days. I watched the weather forecast like a hawk completely panicked until they finally said it would return for 1 more day and so that was the date of the shoot. Unfortunately Elbie was booked and couldn’t come, so I had to do the make-up myself! I was down in numbers by two assistants and knew it was going to be hard work dragging everything to the location. The promise of snow had been correct, but the amount of it was pretty pathetic. As the morning wore on, to my absolute horror the snow was melting at a rate of knots and by the time we left at 11am over half my garden had melted back to the grass. Luckily the location was sheltered and held on to the snow far better than most places, but we still had to move buckets of it to pack out the area we built the set in. The day was passing too quickly and I really struggled to find a suitable spot to shoot in. As a result once I had chosen the place, I turned into an absolute demonic nightmare of a woman shouting for ‘MORE SNOW’ whilst I ripped at the sheets of icicles with my bare hands because my fingers were too frozen to hold any scissors! All in all it was utterly traumatic, there would be no second chances, the forecast was set to get warmer, and this one brief day of snow was all I had. The only blessing we received was that it took so long to set everything up, that as 3pm arrived and the sun hung low in the sky, our little set suddenly trapped the low golden light and a gentle magic filtered through the trees. I took pictures until dusk and stopped when the scenery began to droop in its piles of melting snow. I walked away numb and feeling sick with no idea if I had anything useful at all,….. unbelievably  there was one lucky shot in a miserly 75 pictures I managed to take. This is the price I pay for shooting everything on location in the UK you can never predict the weather, sometimes I’d give anything to fly to different climates and do this kind of thing calmly. Anyway to explain further, the point of the picture was really to demonstrate the emptiness of Gammelyns life without becoming human. The weather was a metaphor for his loneliness, and his pose was deliberately like a statue …. as I wanted it to amplify a sense of the world moving and changing around him, while he remained the same. This why I named the picture ‘The Thousand Empty Days of a Frozen Heart’ …..in essence, it was to depict the interim between the two states of his transformation into a real man – without the ability to feel love, there was no point to his existence.

Finally moving on to March, we shot the ‘birth’ – obviously not in a literal sense but it was the moment King Gammelyn comes to life from his overgrown throne. I made the throne pieces as a kind of flat-pack set, as there was no way we would be able to carry such a huge prop to the location in one go. So I spent days skulking around the woods sawing off dead tree roots, and drilling them together in the back garden. I was particularly pleased with my bizarre little flower trees, which cost a fortune in roses and spray paint, but look so funny I’ve decided to keep them in my spare room from now on! I prepared crates of painted roots, Ivy, and flowers, worked out how everything would connect and then rebuilt it on the location. It was a brilliant day, so relaxed, great weather and just hysterically funny to shoot, because it looked so incredible when it was all in place. The costume had been pushed to its absolute limit with all the flowers, and Elbie had a field day with Adam painting him endless shades of purple pink and blue, letting out squeaks of delight saying how ‘pretty’ he looked in the sunlight. We teased him all day laughing at his ridiculous tutu underskirt, his sparkly eye make-up and purple lips, and Adam took it all in good faith and more. It was a relief to finally finish the set and I feel now I have accomplished what I wanted, and I can safely say I never….. ever …… want to see another fake flower as long as I live!

Adam getting his make-up done, and below building the throne

(Above) setting up for the final picture, and below Laura and Elbie with Adam. I absolutely love these pictures so much, it was great fun to create such a bizarre picture without any pressure from the weather or a disgruntled model !

So thats it. I guess the one huge thing you may have noticed whilst reading this is that you are now in my brand new website !!!!  It has been so much work but I was determined to design something that really celebrated the project and gave it a proper home. If you have a moment I hope you can find time to have a look around at the new layout and see all the new behind the scenes galleries, press, and lots more information on the series and how it started. Its also now full widescreen and is compatible for Iphone and Ipads too! There will be a new opening animation coming as well, but it has been delayed a little longer.

 Finally there are still some more finished Wonderland pictures waiting to be added to the series, so I’m pushing on until I finally get up to date with it all. I have 2 more small shoots, and then (at last) I can share a big block of pictures of a very beautiful character I shot last April. It has been killing me sitting on her pictures for so long and will be such a relief when everything is made public! ……. And one more bit of press to mention for those of you in the UK,  ‘Gammelyn’s Daughter’ and ‘The White Queen’ have been published in the UK’s biggest selling photography magazine ‘Digital Photo’ so here’s a little picture of the spread  :)

‘Gammelyn’s Daughter’

‘Gammelyn’s Daughter, a Waking Dream’

‘Euphaeidae’ (gossamerwing)

 ’While Nightingale’s Wept’

Gammelyn’s Daughter was such a precious shoot for me, and one that I have found myself reflecting on a great deal.  If I’m honest this was the shoot that finally made me decide to leave my career in fashion forever, and to commit wholly to becoming an artist. The pictures have become my memento of this turning point, and despite having a very panicky start on the day, they have probably turned out to be some of the most beautiful photos I have ever taken.

The set was completely unplanned, and wasn’t part of my original ending for Wonderland, but sometimes things just happen, and I’m a huge believer in following your gut instinct. It all began back in August 2011 after I had spent 2 solid days location scouting by car, bike, and on foot. I was in the process of searching for a place to shoot the ‘The Queen’s Armada’ and was beginning to feel a little desperate. After 16 hours of exploring, I was sunburnt, wired and had spent far too much time running around forests and fishing lakes on my own muttering to myself like a madwoman.  It was a hot Sunday afternoon and my long suffering husband Matt had made the mistake of offering to keep me company on my final search of the day. I had dragged him through endless undergrowth for hours, and just as we decided it was time to give up and head home, we passed a small car park at the edge of a wood, and decided to have one last look. We headed through the trees following a path to the crest of a hill, where the sky opened overhead and there suddenly beneath us, the ground fell away to a vast valley brimming knee deep in soft purple-pink heather. It took my breath away…… I have never seen wild heather in full bloom, and certainly never expected in my wildest dreams to discover such a huge area full of it. I couldn’t speak, I think I let out a high-pitched squeak, and threw my arms in the air, it was magnificent…..  the type of thing I could only dream of finding, but never imagined I would. The whole landscape was purple, even the trunks of the trees appeared to be stained a matching hue, and between my toes the earth was a soft delicate grey sand. It was extraordinary, so wild and organic, nothing like the regimented lanes of farmed lavender I had used in the past.  I was uncontrollable, bouncing up and down scrabbling for my phone to call Elbie and Katie, no matter what happened, we had to shoot in this place, and do it before the flowers lost their colour. The whole way home I sat in the car fidgeting, repeatedly flicking back through the pictures I took on my phone, to think we could have driven straight past that magical goldmine and never known it was there…. I couldn’t believe our luck.

So a date was set to shoot. It was an unbelievable coincidence, but I already had a dress I had previously designed for Wonderland in a perfect ghostly pink. It was made from meters of extremely delicate silk, in the lightest weight of chiffon you can buy which behaves beautifully for movement, drape, and is sheer enough to let light through. It was a ridiculous stroke of luck, and at least gave me something to start with. Over the days that followed I went to the location for the dawn on my own, and slowly a character began to build in my head. These mornings were so precious to me; my pulse was racing as I arrived each day to be met with each incredible sunrise….. the light was spectacular, and the whole forest comforted me with its gentle colours and the warmth of its sand. In some ways the landscape felt alien with its unusual grey / pinks and towering Nordic pines, but also strangely familiar, I felt connected to it and safe, despite being a woman there on my own .
After spending some time sitting in the heather I knew that I wanted to create a picture unlike my other fields of flowers, I wanted this one to fill the frame with solid colour and detail, so it would have to be shot from above.  I wanted the image to be beautiful but have a deeper, darker feel. The idea of an eternal dream, an endless sleep,….. a most beautiful floral death began to fill my head. The lightness of the dress fabric and the way it would create hundreds of folds when spread over the flowers, reminded me of the way crypt statues are carved  – how the form of the body is never lost, yet the fabric becomes the main aesthetic of the craftsmanship. This then led me further into thinking of religious iconography, the depiction of saints, and their typical poses. This may sound like a very random chain of thought but it seemed to make perfect sense. I wanted my character to be royal, exquisite, yet distant and unreachable – both in the fact she could not be broken from her endless sleep, but also unapproachable in the way religious statues are to be respected and not touched. Creating a beautiful floral image of a woman that is not sickly sweet, or contrived was my goal. Something haunting that made you question who she was, and why she was there. So these were my building blocks, the idea of her body floating on the flowers also tied in perfectly with the importance of how each new character must own a galleon ship, which some of you may have begun to notice as the series has developed.

researching the carved fabric of statues

The longer I spent at the location, the more I began to look further than just the flowers, the grey sand began to feel important and so did the insects that surrounded me. I came across dragonflies by the lake at the edge of the valley, which then led me towards creating the ‘Euphaeidae’ picture (Latin name of the dragonfly commonly known as a ‘gossamerwing’).  Once again I had actually already started making some wings a few months before discovering the heather, and had planned to shoot a far more stylized and darker character using them. I loved the wings because they weren’t ‘pretty’ they reminded me of a leafs skeleton – imperfect, mismatching, and autumnal. I decided to embed them into lumps of mod-rock (plaster of paris coated bandages) and then hand painted these with tinted shade of latex to give them a gnarled flesh and bone appearance. I had always avoided creating a winged creature for the series before because of the cringe-worthy connotations they usually bring. I decided, that whether she would be deemed as a fairy or a dragonfly, I wanted to avoid every stereotype in the book – pointy ears, glitter and all the other slightly naff associations you often encounter with this subject. I wanted my girl to appear utterly real, natural and believable, which meant striping things back to the bare bones, and is why is in the end I chose to shoot her nude on the day.

Working on the ‘bone’ parts of the wings

Finally I had one more idea in my head, which is where the characters name came from; it was one of my favourite childhood stories ‘Gammelyn the dressmaker’. As always I never want to recreate something that already exists, and so the concept came from one of the books beautiful illustrations. It was taken from the part where Gammelyn (the royal dressmaker) makes a magic cloak from butterfly wings that enables him to fly away from the palace where he had been enslaved.  The dress I had designed had so much fabric in it, that I knew the movement would be incredible, and the idea of recreating flight was something I have always wanted to attempt. The only challenge was I wanted to create it for real, and not through endless layers in Photoshop.

‘Gammelyn The Dressmaker’ book illustration that inspired me

Second to the book illustration I was also inspired by the Chris Cunningham Gucci advert, and after seeing so many incredible sunrises that week, I decided I wanted to incorporate flight, colour, the dawn and the sheerness of the fabric. It was a bit of a grand idea, but after obsessing over whether it was possible I was determined to give it a try.   And so ‘Gammelyn’s daughter’ was born. In truth, it became a melting pot of all the things I had started developing, and suddenly tied together all the loose ends like  it had been planned for months. It helped me form a link and identity for the character that comes next, and in the end everything fell into place.

The night before the shoot everyone came to stay at my house, as we had to be at the location for just after the dawn. For once I felt quite prepared and very sure of my plan, the order in which I wanted to shoot and how each scene would look. I felt confident and excited; the sunrise had been perfect all week, what could possibly go wrong?

…… Well of course the answer to that was ‘the weather’. After days of picture perfect light, when we arrived at the location and unpacked the van, I looked at the sky and felt my hopes slowly dissolve into the murky grey drizzle of a very uneventful sunrise. We dragged everything to the spot I had planned for the first glorious picture of Katie as the dragonfly rising above the flowers against the sun …… to be met with dull dark wet heather, covered in spider webs. My heart sank into my boots, inside I was destroyed and horribly embarrassed, as this was the first time I had two new assistants helping me, and I already felt like a fool. So much had been based on the sunlight that I genuinely did not know what to do. Everyone huddled together with the equipment, whist I frantically marched about desperate for inspiration on how to turn things around. During this incredibly awkward hour I fell down the same hole in the ground 3 times, completely soaked my clothes grovelling around in the dew, and covered myself and my boots in mud! I could hear the muffled sniggers from Matt and the others as I fell down the hole for the third time, and had to admit the whole thing was a disaster bordering on a Monty Python sketch. Its times like this when I feel you can either be defeated by nature or let it guide you, and in hindsight the way the day changed actually became the one thing that probably made the images better than my original plans. We always joke that my mum ‘does the weather’ for the shoots and I found myself muttering under my breath… ‘What now mum, seriously what on earth do I do now?’ I looked around me and the only interesting features were the chandelier droplets of water on the spider webs. I tired to pick up the stems with them on, but they instantly shattered and disappeared. So I followed them, looking for a place to position Katie. This went on for another 20 minutes and I was aware of the light changing and the day beginning. Previously during my week of prep I had also become mildly obsessed with the new iamamiwhoami video, which captured a beautiful mysterious foggy dawn,……. and if nothing else, I didn’t want to lose this similar atmosphere that we had now found ourselves in.

Video still from iamamiwhoami’s ‘Clump’

Eventually guided by the webs, I sat Katie near an interesting cluster. I tried to shoot her against them, but nothing was working until I stopped and suddenly looked at the bigger picture. Without realising it, I had sat her in the middle of a perfectly framed deep V created by the distant trees, …….. the landscape began and ended with her profile…… and her pale skin glowed against a spectrum of tonal purple, blues and greens. The sun began to break through the clouds, and slowly the shadow of the veins in the wings crept across her back as though they were embedding themselves into her skin. The others began to notice and Elbie let out a squeal. It changed everything; the wings became part of her, the framing of the trees, the cold light ……. I honestly think in all the years I have shot Katie, she has never looked more beautiful. I felt like this moment was made for her, she looked so fresh, ethereal… but most importantly entirely believable. Even though I had finished I remember hesitating for a few brief moments to look at her a little longer. Sometimes I think she has no idea how captivating she can be, she truly was my vision, my little dragonfly brought to life. I didn’t expect it to feel the way I did, but it was so true… I think I even held my breath. The picture has remained a precious memory for me, and now every time I look at it, I can’t seem to separate it from this piece of music,…. the two together sum up the emotion I felt.

(* close up detail)  – I loved how the shadow of the wings appeared like blood capillaries on Katie’s face.

So, finally the first shot was over and the day felt like it had begun. After that initial picture it sounds silly but the day seemed less about me and my ideas and more about following instinct and the surroundings,…… like nature was helping us. I accepted my plans would change, but also appreciated things might be better for it.

We then moved on to the ‘flying’ scene, which was absolutely hilarious to create and a relief to have some fun. I had thought of an idea during the week to create a powerful wind, and the results were unbelievable when we tried it out. Sadly its times like this that I have had to question how I share everything on this blog, and unfortunately after coming across a lot of copycat pictures online, there are some secrets that I now feel I have to keep in order to protect what I do. This also goes for explaining the dragonfly wings, which I have now received over 60 emails about from people. I’m greatly touched by how kind and lovely most were, but others bizarrely wrote to me just asking to be given the wings directly, or demanded exact step by step instructions on how they were made. I even had one letter telling me to ‘hurry up’ with this post so they could copy them!  I became a little uncomfortable with this, and decided that the wings along with the wind technique needed to be keep private, or at least until I produce the Wonderland book, I hope people can understand why I have done this.
Anyway, here are some really funny and pretty amazing first attempts with our low-tech ‘wind machine’. It took three people to create the effect and none of what you can see here has been manipulated in Photoshop. I took these pictures from a stepladder dying with laughter, with heather sellotaped under the camera in a bin bag to create the blurred out floral framing. By this point some people were awake and were out walking their dogs, they certainly got a surprise!!

After we shot this scene I thought the picture was ticked off the list, but I’ve begun trying to reassess experiences if I have time on location, and found it can sometimes create unexpected, maybe even better results re-shooting the same picture from a second perspective. In doing this, and knowing I already had something good enough, it made the second set up a far less strained atmosphere, and a much freer mood. The picture I took later was better and far more dramatic, and was certainly worth an extra half hour of playing around.
(below are some detail shots from warming up for this second attempt)

Finally we moved on to the full frame aerial shot of Katie dying in the heather. This one took over 1.5 hours to set up but was worth every minute.  Elbie and I have talked about this picture a lot since the shoot and we both feel we learnt a great deal from creating it. From Elbie’s perspective it was one of the few times she has finished her make-up on location and the results were really noticeable. Unlike most of our shoots, there wasn’t the luxury of having hours to work on the hair and make-up before we set off. Instead Elbie finished the job surrounded by the flowers in the mid morning sun, and the difference was huge. She absorbed the colour level around her, and could match exact shades to the flowers and the grey soil. She said to me afterwards it was that same feeling of nature guiding her hand, it’s strange but we both felt so similar about how the day was progressing.

We then began by laying Katie down on a bed of pillows that raised her body level to the height of the flowers and set to work on creating the scene. Once again I chose to use nature to define the effects, rather than use artificial elements. We collected buckets of the grey sand and sieved it from a height over the fabric of the dress. It weighed the folds down and created deep defined creases, just like the clothes on the statues that had inspired me. Next we took piles of hair extensions and soaked them in a mix of water and sand and imbedded them around Katie’s own hair. They were absolutely gross, but it blended and bound her to the flowers, like she had been there for years, curling the pieces through the flowers also amplified that ‘floating’ look I was hoping for.

Making the pretty horrible dirty hair pieces with water and the grey sand (and Elbie looking very pleased with the results! )

Finally we spent a long time spraying her hair with subtle shades of white, pink and purple, as well as the visible parts of her body.  I paid specific attention to her feet, as I wanted them exposed, to bring attention back to the religious undertones of the pose.  The drape of the fabric, the soft greys and swirls of the hair worked so beautifully together. It might sound silly but to me it felt like Wonderland was growing up -  less about harsh brash colours, more about respecting the surroundings and using them to effect the image and work in harmony with it. The overcast sky was perfect for the shot as strong light would have bleached out the details of Katie’s pale skin and the dress, and so the afternoon was warm and silent, and felt heavy with the thick clouds that watched from above.

Eventually after endless trips to the top of the stepladder and back down to rearrange Katie’s hair, dress, and the little tin ship in her hands everything was ready. I think when I finally looked through the lens it was quite an emotional picture of me, it was just one of the most beautiful images I think I have ever created. Katie had fallen asleep and the whole mood came to life, I was so happy it was her, who maybe deserved something so beautiful after all the dreadful things I have made her go through in the past – swamps, snow, mud and mosquito’s!  Everything was better than I had imagined, and it somehow grabbed that uncertainty I wanted. After taking a series of shots I then added layers of dried hydrangea petals around her head and across her body to create another colour level to the image. I’m beginning to learn that ‘more is more’ with my work, cramming the images with detail is something I enjoy, and colour is always so vital to this. I’ve learnt to try and bring anything and everything I have lying around at home on the off chance It might add that ‘something special’, even if it isn’t an obvious link at the time.

Finally I took the close up portrait that became ‘A waking dream’.  It was a complete last minute fluke of a shot, but has now become one of my all time favourites. I didn’t notice any of the details until I got home and saw the picture big on my laptop – the way the flowers framed her one vacant eye, and cut across her lip, and the contrast of her pale painted hands, against the metal of the ship. Katie’s eyes are such an extraordinary blue, they seemed to just slice through the frame, it felt so intimate like she really was waking from a spell, yet somehow maintained a distant uncomfortable edge. I don’t feel like the resulting picture is welcoming or entirely human, but nonetheless you feel like you are there next to her opening her eyes for the first time, ….. it feels private which I really love.
Anyway…. I’ve probably written far too much as always. I think for me it was wonderful to feel a little more connected with these pictures again in the way that some of the very early Wonderland pictures felt – it was less about a huge production and more about my relationship with Katie, nature and the weather that day. It was hard going, and tiring, but the location was comforting, quiet and we weren’t disturbed for the entire day.  In the end we also managed to get that second attempt at the flying picture, and this time the results were incredibly dramatic. The thick of the woods created a completely blacked out background that made Katie and the dress far more ghostly and strange. Katie is a circus performer and so is thankfully used to expressing herself and throwing her body into very dramatic shapes and poses. I wanted her to appear to be running from danger, that the darkness would swallow her if she didn’t get away,…. so she twisted and twirled in the path of the wind and produced some extraordinary results. And so we walked away with a camera packed full of unexpected and really exciting pictures, after originally thinking the day would be a disaster.

When we got back it was almost 6pm, I was exhausted but also felt so exhilarated and alive. Elbie and I crashed on the living room floor and played back the raw pictures on my laptop, rolling around stuffing the sleeves of our pyjamas into our mouths groaning with delight at the close up shots of Katie in the heather.  I was thrilled, the colours were beautiful and so vivid straight out the camera, and we both felt that we had learnt so much. Sometimes I think I must sound like a mad old hippy going on and on about working with nature, respecting it, and how somehow we had felt guided by it that day, but it was genuine. Both of us felt it, and I know the results were better for it.  In the end we just used the grey sandy soil, dried flower petals, the sun for shadows on skin and our extremely low-tech ‘wind machine’ It felt right, and better than trampling over the location with a massive entourage of people, lighting equipment, props and over styled accessories. Katie was nude for one shot, and the others were just a simple dress that complimented the tone of the flowers, it could not have been more different to the drama of The White Queen pictures, and that for me is a great balance to have throughout the series.  I tend to think about the shoots now as an entire body of work and am always trying to change the perspective, scale, and framing of every image, so there is a meandering between huge scenes back to intimate close ups. To create movement in some, whereas others are extremely posed and highly static, and to always try my best to underpin this with the emotions that I feel in that moment. I guess it might not always be successful, but to sum up, those are my goals :)

…. I think the dawn start was a bit too much for my assistant Steve ! :)

Finally, I’m sure no one will be able to face reading this after such a long blog entry, but I’ve also just done an enormous interview with Kat Williams aka ‘The Rock and Roll Bride’. Sometimes she writes about things outside of the wedding world that she finds inspiring and feel will appeal to her readers,  and so she asked me to explain how Wonderland came to be, and to talk about how the series has developed. Its a good one for general information, and for a lot of the students that contact me asking for interviews I think this one will really help.  You can read it here

And to end, the reason there has been such a long delay with this post is that I have spent the last few weeks creating and shooting 2 extra scenes for the next character coming…. and its a big one ! So very soon I will be introducing Wonderlands first male :) and it will be 5 pictures all at once, and I cant wait to finally share them with you all ! Oh and theres also a press update blog entry I did before this one, if you are interested in further interviews and news on how the White Queen was received, I didn’t announce it anywhere as most of you are already keep up with that stuff on my fb group :)

Well here goes ….. to be honest I don’t really know how to explain what happened after I uploaded the first 3 images of Wonderlands return. Within minutes of posting ‘The White Queen’ series my laptop nearly blew up. I never imagined such a response; I was utterly shocked and so humbled by the overwhelming reaction. I have had emails from Russia, Australia, New Zealand, America, France, Switzerland and even Bulgaria! My Facebook group jumped by over 2000 people and I have so far given 4 interviews, with more requests waiting. The pictures have been blogged around the planet, as well as all 5 out of 5 being featured on the front page of Italian Vogue’s ‘photovogue’ with ‘The Queen’s Armada’ being made their photo of the day!  So I wanted to make this post to share the interview links with you all, but to also just say thank you from the bottom of my heart to everyone who wrote to me, or left messages on the various sites and my fb group, your support honestly means so much.  The other big news is that I was selected as a finalist for the huge global ‘Artists Wanted ‘Exposure’ competition last week, and I can now also say that the same happened with their ‘One life’ competition that was announced at the end of 2011. I didn’t mention it at the time as the pictures I entered were unreleased, and I didn’t want to draw attention to them. One of the pictures ‘Gammelyn’s Daughter, a Waking Dream’ has been selected by the jury to be printed in their ‘One life in Photos’ book, which will be released soon.

So anyway here’s a round up of the interviews and various bit and bobs. I will attach an English Translation of the Bulgarian Interview at the end of this post for anyone who would like to read it ;)

Interview for Bulgarian Fashion website ‘Pinks’ -

The first interview I gave for the new pictures was an exclusive I did with the amazing people at My Modern Met who have over 3 million readers a month. They have supported myself and Wonderland from the very beginning, so I wanted them to be the ones that got the release. You can read it here.

The third interview I did was also with a long running friend, the lovely Mike at ‘Warholian’ . His was the first proper interview I think I ever did about 2 years ago, so it was great to catch up with him again too. You can read it here.

Then there was the Exposure competition -

and the ‘One Life’ competition -

And finally one of my old self portraits has been made the cover of ILEX publishers spring catalogue, which is pretty funny ! I have a chapter in one of their new books that will be released in March on Creative Portraiture , and their designer chose my ugly mug for the front page ! They also printed ‘The Storyteller’ from Wonderland on the inside cover too.

So that’s it for the moment. I have already released 3 new images following The White Queen pictures which you can see in the main Wonderland gallery, and I will be writing a big blog post on those in the coming week. I’m also excited to say that I have redesigned my whole website, and hope to launch it very soon. The new site will be full widescreen and be available to Ipads and Iphones, horray!.

Finally  for anyone who wanted to read the Bulgarian interview, this is the translation below  :)  -

‘Interview with Pinks’

Dear Kirsty, It`s the debut of your Wonderland series in front of Bulgarian public and we thank you for your trust. How did you start the project, we know those beautiful images have a sad story behind them…

This is often a difficult question to answer in a few short words because the project and its origins are extremely personal and emotional to me on levels that might not always be apparent to the casual viewer. The series is my tribute to the memory of my mother who I sadly lost in November 2008. She was my best friend; and died of a brain tumor miles away from her family and friends in the UK, after moving to France for her retirement.  She was too ill to bring home, and so she had a tiny funeral that broke my heart. I remember walking away on that day wanting, and needing to do something that would let people know who she was, and how she had touched the lives of so many children. She had been an English teacher all her life, and spent years inspiring her students, and myself with her passion for literature and her captivating stories. She had read to me everyday until I was too old to admit it to my friends, and instilled a belief in beauty and wonder that has now become the root of my work.  So I decided this was how I wanted her to be remembered …. to create something that would celebrate her gift to others – magical worlds full of colour and endless possibility. Six months after her passing I began work on the concept of creating a visual storybook without words, of unexplained beautiful strange characters, each within their own magical worlds. I never planned for the series to grow in the way it has, or to last over 2.5 years. It just evolved constantly, and seemed to capture the imagination of so many online that it began to have its own following.  The support of so many kind people has spurred me on, and I am now entering into the final stages of the project. The final focus is to publish a book and create an exhibition of the entire series in her memory

The photos are all stunning and it`s very curious how they were taken. Nature is unbelievable can you tell us more about the locations? And also a major part – the clothes, the make-up… Is it you behind all that? Not the execution, but the creative part?

A huge part of Wonderland is about the fact that so many of us seem to forget that these magical places are real and are on our doorsteps. I feel that recent generations are fixated on TV, films, and computer games for their escapism, forgetting that there is a whole world out there to discover. I always say I felt like I never ‘truly looked’ until it was through a lens. This journey has changed my view of life and I am only now at the age of 35 realising the immeasurable beauty of the natural world. So this is what I try to communicate in my work – Wonderland is real, in the sense of all the landscapes are true. In some cases I have waited for a whole year to shoot a picture during a certain natural phenomenon  – like the sudden appearance of the bluebell flowers in the UK. They only last around 2 weeks but are the most incredible sight. I take these locations and then boost them with surreal characters echoing the colours and using unnatural proportions, to produce a dream like image that is believable yet surreal at the same time.
With regards to the costumes, props and make-up, I make and design everything within the frame. The entire series is art directed by myself, there are no big teams of stylists or designers. I create the characters, and storyboard the concept, then work with my make-up and hair artist Elbie Van Eeden on bringing the vision to life. People don’t seem to believe that all the images are hand made, and often presume its all done in Photoshop, which can be very frustrating. I keep a diary of how each shoot was produced on my website so people can see the props and costumes being made, its can take anything from 1 – 5 months to create what I need for one idea. I work as an artist and creating the entire image is vital to what I do, the preparation is equal to photographing the finished product.

Its a project that`s actually still going on, have you ever thought how it should end? Could you give us a hint, please?

The project has been running for 2.5 years now with a 9-month break since last April during which I have been working on 20 new images away from the Internet. I was advised to slow down and really focus on creating more complicated scenes and characters, and I’m really glad that I did. I learnt a great deal, and have worked incredibly hard on the development of the new shoots.  I also felt that the series would need a definite end, and so I have been weaving an underlying story into the pictures, which will become more apparent as the series progresses. All I can say is I have had the ending planned for since 2010, but the scenes are a great deal of work to produce as it now feels more like creating a film set than just a picture. The only hint I can give is to look back through the images and find the galleon ships, they are very important, as well as the key being held in the hands of the latest addition to the series ‘The White Queen’ :)

Since the beginning, how far has your Wonderland traveled? You have said you still cannot believe how popular those photos became and the many countries and people you have showed them to.

Wonderland has literally been around the planet now. I am constantly amazed and touched to hear from people all over the world. I can’t believe how something that began in my back garden has become so recognized. The project has been written about in Israel, Russia, China, Japan, America, Europe, and now in your magazine for Bulgaria! I am so genuinely grateful for all the kind things have said and the support I have been shown, I’m honestly deeply humbled and surprised, I really don’t know what to say sometimes.

At last, why do you think that everyone finds something fascinating in your photos? What is the message in them that manages to get to everyone?

I think even without knowing the story behind the pictures, there is something that so many of us can tap into. A distant faded memory of childhood stories, not an exact match, but a thread of recognition. That was what I was trying to achieve, I feel it’s a little empty to recreate actual stories – so many people have done ‘Alice in Wonderland’ pictures, or Grimm’s fairytales. I wanted to create images that made the viewer feel familiar in a strange unexplained way, but then allowed their imagination to run away with the idea. I feel there’s a lot of sadness in the world, or just simple frustration and stress – modern life never gives us much time to rest or dream. Escapism can be powerful, inspiring, or just give you a feeling of possibility when reality can get too much. So if it’s a daydream, or just a chance to feel far, far away for a few moments, then that would make me very happy :)

Well, it has been 9 long months since I last uploaded a new Wonderland photo, and now…. finally I can take you with me on the second part of this journey. I’m writing this as a free, self employed woman, having left fashion design on the 29th of December to step into the unknown, and see how following my heart truly tastes. It has taken me a full 8 days to pull together all the photographs of the development and creation of this first character ‘The White Queen’, and its been quite overwhelming looking back at everything I made considering I was still working full time. Back in April last year I had a discussion with an art curator who advised me to step back from the internet and the crazed world of constantly uploading. Instead, he told me to focus, and push myself to the absolute limit by creating less, but also the very best I physically could. To invest my time and money into something I truly believed in, and create an entire vision from start to finish with no compromises ……. So this is what I have tried my hardest to do. Its been extremely difficult not showing anyone what I have been up to, and even harder sitting on piles of unedited shoots, constantly having to go from the development of one character, to the next, without the satisfaction or release of editing a final image to share. I’ve watched other photographers racing ahead with their projects and ideas, and felt quite alone working on everything pretty much on my own, apart from shoot days, or the occasional help of friends and the visits from dearest Elbie. Having said this I am so very glad I put myself through this period. I have learned a huge amount about being ruthlessly selective with my work, balancing a body of images across a large number of shoots, and each time contemplating the colours, scale, and perspective based on what was achieved with the previous ones. I have also learned a very hard lesson about knowing my limits, as once again I made myself extremely unwell with stress and exhaustion, and its taken nearly 3 months to finally getting back on the path to feeling better .
So before I go any further I should point out this entry is an enormous one as there are over 6 months of photos following the development of the costume, the props and finally the two major shoots we produced. I have split these elements into sections, starting with the ‘making’ and ending with the actual shoot days in case people find this all a bit much to wade through. I have also made a short film of the steel ships being manufactured, and I figured I’d better show that here first, before anyone falls asleep !!

Wonderland’s “The White Queen” from Kirsty Mitchell on Vimeo.

So now you’ve seen that, this the story of how ‘The White Queen’ came to be …………….

The queen started over 18 months ago when I had an extremely vivid dream during the early stages of Wonderland.  The dream was basically exactly how ‘The Queen’s Armada’ now looks, and to be honest it’s quite emotional to look at that picture and know that I managed to create it so accurately with my bare hands. Wonderland is all rooted in the stories my mother read to me as a child, and one of the most beautifully illustrated books I can remember was ‘The Kingdom under the Sea’. I had become fascinated with paper cuts, and had stumbled on the the extraordinary work of Elsa Mora which is utterly bewitching. Looking at her work triggered off distant memories of the books illustrations and after finally after wracking my brains, I remembered the title and tracked down the original 1973 edition. Looking through the pages and remembering the stories, touching each beautifully drawn image made up my mind that I wanted to tackle the idea of paper coming to life, in a ’3D pop up book’ kind of way.  This thread of inspiration became entwined with my urge to create a beautiful, but evil queen who was to be part of the darker side to ‘Wonderland’, a character who wasn’t about colour, and one who would be instrumental in the ending of the series. As the character began to develop, her involvement in the story became clearer, and it was suddenly vital that the queen should be linked with the under current of ships that can be found in the series. This cast my final idea in stone, and I found myself dreaming of a white ‘sculpted’ Elizabeth the Ist, commanding her armada of paper-cut ships, gliding through misty waters deep in the woods……  I knew exactly how it would look, now I just had the enormous problem of making it!

Below is the finished costume, made entirely by me from scratch, apart from the corset which was a vintage buy that I hand painted, and the crown which was an antique I sprayed white.

The White Queen’s costume

The finished steel ‘paper-cut’ galleon prop

Below I have tried my absolute hardest to reduce the ‘making of’ the costume into bite size chunks.  It is the biggest, hardest costume I have ever made, and there where many times I found myself sitting in the garden staring at pile of unpainted fans losing the will to live. It is the most determined I think I have ever been to make something, and do it ‘properly’, as a lot of the previous Wonderland costumes were destroyed on the shoots, were recycled into something else, or just couldn’t stand the test of time. I thought a lot about the problems raised when shooting an entirely white character, and so decided to hand paint deep shaded contrast into and around all the fans, it took forever but was a life saver on the day of the shoot. The skirt and headdress were made from over 240 delicate fine wooden fans from China, and the whole costume took me over 5 months to make in my evenings, weekends and annual leave. I also made the necklace and key prop from a very strange collection of antique items (and bones) I sourced through the internet and vintage fairs from 3 different countries. It took 6 months to find all the different bits I needed, and unbelievably I managed to match two 1920′s celluloid galleon brooches within 4 months of buying each one! My main focus was to create a hard, stiff sculpted version of an Elizabethan silhouette, that suggested a cage…. like an evil prison. I chose to use an antique pair of Balinese shadow puppets at the front of the domed skirt to suggest a pair of fighting gate keepers, whose locked hands were the fastening to the queens body inside.

The key prop is very important to the story, and will reappear at various points in the hands of different characters. It is the symbol of beauty and death, a continuous flow from the form of the fairy through the body of the skeleton to the bare bones that make up the teeth. I think it is possibly my favourite prop in the series and one I will keep forever.

Whilst working on the costume, I finally had to face the fact that I needed to design the galleon ship props myself after unsuccessfully approaching a few paper cut artists hoping for a collaboration. I have never done anything like this before, and had no contacts and no idea what I was doing. Its been one of the hardest things I have ever attempted, and there were many times when I nearly gave up. In my ignorance I thought I could just draw a galleon ship silhouette, take some of the book illustrations and work them into the shape. I presumed I could have the stencil cut in light wood any size I wanted, and that it would be reasonably affordable….. I had no idea how wrong I was.

To start with the illustrations were more like fine ink drawings than hard clear silhouettes suitable for a stencil. After I had finished my galleon outline and roughly tried to place some of characters into the shape, I began to release the enormous problem faced with positive and negative space – how no line could overlap without being connected, as it would just simply fall out of the design when it was cut. Everything need to be supported, connected, and extremely sharp in its details and shape – basically everything the original illustrations were not. After three 12 hour days I was close to giving up. It was an incredibly complicated, and utterly mind numbing process having to re-draw every single detail using a computer tablet by hand. The only thing that kept me going was that this prop, more than anything else in the entire series was a direct, real and tangible link to my mother, and the nights I remembered pressed against her arms while she read to me.
Seven long days later I finished my design, but was then faced with the mountain of ‘production’ and began to contact factories …….

My first experience with a factory was www.lasercutit.co.uk  They were incredibly kind to me, and offered to help produce the props at a reduced rate to be involved with the project, for which I was, and still am so grateful. They work with a lot of artists and creative people, and seemed the perfect choice for my idea. They tested different materials and sent me a range of beautiful test cuts which took over 3 hours each for the lasers to cut. I was completely unprepared for the projected costs, and once I discovered the limited materials available and the size of their laser cutting bed, I had to face the fact that my design was not suitable.  I needed a major industrial factory to make my design, and a far stronger base material which also had to be waterproof.
Eventually after writing endless begging emails, and lots of rejection because my design was ‘too detailed’, I finally found a factory with a cutting bed the size I wanted. The only problem was it meant that the galleons would have to be cut in steel by a state of the art nitrogen cutter.  It was at this point everything seemed to be spiraling out of control. It had taken weeks of trial and error to get this far, and I finally found myself involved with an industrial steel cutting factory, with a price tag to match. But by now the costume was almost made, the idea was rock solid in my head, and there wasn’t any other way I could imagine producing the picture. This was the first time I had to make a very serious and expensive investment in the project. It was a huge leap of faith for me, but I felt I had to pursue the concept, and get to the end no matter what. So I bit my lip and did it, and with hindsight I am so glad I did……..

On the day of the props being made, I arrived at the factory Cirrus- Laser to be met with the sight of the computer screen below (first picture), which looked like s star constellation of thousands of reference points for the machine to follow. The amount of work that had gone into the programming was completely mind blowing and extremely humbling. It was the most complicated design the machine had ever had to cut, and I felt extremely guilty about the fact I had refused to simplify it.  After a few hours of stop / starting and a lot of fine tuning, the first test piece slowly began to take shape, and that was when everything took on a completely different emotional level.
Until then it had just been a very frustrating, expensive money-pit of a ridiculous idea, one that made me nervous and quite sick with worry. But that all changed when the operator stepped out the booth with one of the first metal silhouettes to fall from the design. At that moment, at the age of 35 I found myself suddenly holding a physical fragment of a memory. The factories noise blurred and faded as I looked at the little steel mermaid in my hands. It was real… and despite my hand drawing, it was still instantly recognisable as the character from my mothers storybook, it took my breath away. Then the full ship followed, and all at once everything came to life. It was an incredible feeling, a mix of sadness, relief, happiness, and disbelief that it had worked and not fallen apart!  If I’m honest I went home and cried, nothing had prepared me for the sudden emotional lurch of holding the mermaid, and the rush of memories that came with it. This was something deeply personal that I was so proud of making, I sat and flicked through the book again on my bed and hoped that somehow mum knew what that day had been like for me.

So the ships were finished and painted white, the costume was ready, and the original factory www.lasercutit.co.uk had also made me 5 smaller solid ships to help create an armada for the queen. The next hurdle was the fact that in my dream the queen was also walking on water whilst connected to her ships. I suppose you had to laugh really as this was just making things about as difficult as possible. I refuse to fake such effects in Photoshop, so the next challenge was finding a suitable beautiful location with water, that was shallow enough to build an underwater platform for the model to stand on. After several weekends I finally found the perfect place, which was a little ornamental island on a fishing lake. It wasn’t too deep, but smelt pretty bad, and was verging on ‘swamp’ but that felt just right for the intended tone of the picture.
Unlike some shoots this one was not about emotions. It was simply long, hard, and difficult. The only extremely lucky thing that happened was that the UK had a freak heatwave for 2 days in the middle of October. The development of the ships and costume had taken so long, that the shoot had been pushed back and back from July to October. I had been terrified of it raining on the delicate costume, bad light and freezing temperatures for a model standing in water so this was a huge relief.
To be honest it was hard going, my number one concern was getting everything to the location, in one piece as the costume and the props were extremely delicate and expensive, and finally getting them and the model into the water safely.It took  a total of 5 hours to set up. The model Ashleigh had the patience of a saint, but must have been bored out of her mind. I stood at the waters edge barking orders at poor Matt wading through the stinking slime, desperately trying to position the ships and constantly having to rush from one to the other to stop them falling over. It was extremely stressful and the sun was getting lower with every minute that passed.
But as always that familiar excitement began to build as everything fell into place. It was an extraordinary sight, and once the wooden planks had been taken away, Ashleigh truly was the ultimate vision of a our queen standing on the waters surface. It is usually at this point that witnessing the finished scene is a big moment for me, to stand back and take it all in, but there was no time, the light was dying and I felt sick to the stomach with nerves. I was staring at months of work and a huge amount of money. So I went into autopilot….. I was numb, exhausted and shaking a bit. The smoke was pumped into the air, and after several attempts from different angles we got the picture.  I then took some close ups at the waters edge, and before we knew it, it was pitch black and no one could speak they were so tired.
It was only when I got home, and everyone had gone their seperate ways that I looked at the pictures. I hadn’t used any lighting equipment, I never do, and this was something I was quietly very worried about during the shoot.  But there on the screen, after several blurred shots I was suddenly faced with the reality of my original dream staring back at me. I couldn’t believe it, the second to last frame, just before I gave up. It was beautiful, strange and otherworldly, the smoke looked amazing, and somehow….. god knows how, we had pulled it off !

Original location shown above, below setting up the picture, with poor Hannah as the body double for the model ! Plus an example of when smoke seriously goes in the wrong direction !!

So it was over…… but before the euphoric feeling of getting the finished shot had faded, I decided to launch headlong into an idea Elbie had suggested a month or so before. Looking at the design of the ships and remembering the original book illustrations being solid black, it dawned on us that we could reverse the entire concept of the shoot using the ships like shadow puppets or lanterns. We felt the first image did not necessarily show the cutwork of the props to their full potential, and so the concept for ‘The Faraway Tree’ was born. This time I wanted the galleons to be taken from the water, and instead have them hanging like giant magical lanterns from a tree. The props and the costume were perfect for the purpose  -  the skirt of the dress could be lit up like a lampshade, and all that was white in the first scene, would become black. Feeling we had overcome so much with the first picture, this second idea seemed ‘achievable’ and not as daunting as the first, but as usual I was completely wrong again!

It was now October 17th 2011, and ‘The Faraway Tree’ was the final shoot of the year. We were all tired, and I was becoming quite unwell at this point, but after testing the concept in sunlight (see above) the ships as lanterns looked so magical, we simply had to make the final push. I named the picture after another one of my childhood story books, and the final image seemed to fit the name so beautifully. Once again setting up the location was quite excruciating. The warm weather had turned and it was now cold, drizzling and very windy – basically the worst conditions we could hope for apart from heavy rain. Adrenaline was pumping through everyone as the boys scrambled up the tree with reels of wire in the fading afternoon light. I stood and directed the ships into position following a  photoshopped mock-up of the scene I had made as a plan for their positions (see below). For any photographer reading this, I would like to point out this was a life saver on the day because there wasn’t any time to spend hours moving the ships into different positions, they were far too heavy and  it was extremely slow progress.  I made the plan by visiting the location the day before, and photographing the tree with Matt holding one ship beside it for a true scale reference. I then cloned the image and produce the rough placement for the ships. This was vital to getting everything ready accurately, and as quickly as possible

As far as lighting went, it was the first time I have ever shot a scene at night. All the lighting was powered from one very small petrol generator, and I permanently had my heart in my mouth worrying it would just give up and choke on us. The bulbs were standard energy saving ones so they used less power, and all of it was run off a very long home made cable Matt had wired up. As the light finally disappeared, and the wind picked up, I remember standing in the dark thinking it was never going to work. The whole thing smacked of being a disaster, wires everywhere and expensive steel ships furiously flapping in the wind. I kept whispering to myself ‘it will be ok’ over and over again, nervously looking through the viewfinder of my camera on the tripod . But then the roar of the generator broke the silence and the bulbs suddenly sparked into life. What had previously been an uninspiring flat looking scene of blank ships hanging lifeless from a tree, burst into the most magical vision. Everyone whooped! It was incredible, Elbie was jumping up and down, so was I, and I could see the relief on Matts face when the power kicked in. Genuinely it has to be one of the most beautiful things I have witnessed in the series so far, I had tears in my eyes, the rush of emotions were so overwhelming … it was magical … truly…. truly. I was excited, over tired, emotional, shaking and so, so thrilled… this is why I do what I do…. being there in that moment…. I was standing in a dream. My heart soared as the galleons lit up, and there before us were the perfect black illustrations from the book brought to life. The sense of achievement after all the stress of the last few months was immense.
So the finishing touches were made -  a raised platform for the model to stand on, and them around that we built a construction of old twisted branches I had brought from another wood the day before. The intention was to make the tree look like it was coming to life and raising up out of the ground on magical roots – like it could walk off into the night at any moment. It worked so well and once everything was ready and lit, I got the shot and we were finished by 9pm.
I know I will never forget that night. I remember walking around in a daze collecting crates and wires, tripping over things in the dark, still thinking about what had happened. We dragged everything back to the car, and the look on everyone’s face was a picture. It had been relentless for hours, the pace of setting up, and then rushing to get the picture,….. to finally stop felt quite strange. Everyone looked exhausted but so triumphant, we ended up throwing ourselves into a shaky group hug in the glare of the car headlights laughing and groaning, patting our backs ….we had done it! It was the final picture, and now the weather could do its worst, everything that needed to be done had been achieved.
While the others loaded the cars, I pretended I had forgotten something back at the tree and walked off into the night to just take a moment. I knew I had over done things again, my stomach was lurching with cramps and my skin was tingling. I couldn’t remember the last time I had sat quietly in months, but that night, it was honestly worth all the bad stuff that came afterwards. I had made two pictures that were not only for my mother, but they were direct, strong and unbreakable links to her, and the memories I had. I felt like I had taken a few more steps away from my grief, and closed another door on the ghosts of hospitals and unapologetic doctors……… it was all for her.
So thats it. An ENORMOUS first blog entry. There are plenty more to come, and lots of beautiful pictures. ………Wonderland is finally back, and it feels so good ! x