Today I thought I would share the concept art behind the Mad Hatter model in the Alice 3 Gallery. We are very fortunate to have as our lead character artist, Laura Paoletti, a 2011 Carnegie Mellon Graduate in Computer Science and Fine Arts, which makes her uniquely qualified to lead the development of our models.

We decided that nothing would be better than to use Randy Pausch, the founder of the Alice Project,  as the model  for the Mad Hatter. (Which is fitting in so many ways…) Starting with images like this of Randy wearing his Mad Hatter hat, taken during his Last Lecture (image source: sixminutes.dlugan.com)

and also referring to classic Alice in Wonderland images such as this one (image source: www.terry-1.com) by John Tenniel (b. 1820 – d. 1914)

Laura developed the following concept art for the Alice 3 Mad Hatter.