Helenbar
"I had made my dress a few months before for a friend's costume party, and started to make some pictures during my free time, as I am a graphic designer and work a lot with photomontage. Suddenly, it was turning into almost the entire book. I try to be as close to the original text as I can, reading it many times before starting to work. Carroll's text is stuffed full of delightful images that are always in my mind; trying to put it into graphic form is a great satisfaction. After conceiving the images, I photograph myself as Alice using a digital camera with a tripod and timer, and do all the image manipulation using Photoshop, spending almost 30 hours working on each one, which are made in high resolution for printing. The Mock Turtle and Gryphon image alone took me a month and a half. I have been totally surprised by the public response: The site has reached over 300,000 viewers, a number I could never have expected. It has reached some local papers and magazines too; one of them, O Globo, is one of the most important papers in the country and I was given a two-page article in the computer science section. I am very proud of carrying Carroll's work to so many people. A lot of them are surprised to know details from the story, which here in Brazil is more well known through Disney's adaptation than from the original text. Now, at the same time I am working to complete illustrations for the whole story and am searching for sponsors to publish it as a book with a simultaneous exhibition of large-format prints." She was recently interviewed in the Brazilian magazine Vizoo 36 May/June '04 under the title "Helenbar: Digital Alice in Webland."
Knight Letter | The Lewis Carroll Society of North America, Mill Valley CA, n¼ 73, cover, p 39, spring, 2004.
