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. |
 | 2) Wendy Sitting It was while I was doing this sketch that I decided to make Wendy's nightgown progressively more and more tattered. |
 | 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). |
 | 4) Mr and Mrs Darling This sketch was originally attached to a poem about Mrs Darling as Mr Darling's shadow. |
 | 5) Lost Boy This nameless Lost Boy just sort of happened. |
 | 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." |
 | 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. |
 | 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. |