Katia Bligh — Alice in Wonderland
artist
Katia Bligh
Katia Bligh’s animals bite back: patterned pink horses in harnesses drawn tight enough to matter, sticker-sheet casts of small creatures that all look like they are plotting something, portraits with just enough menace to be funny. She is entirely self-taught, working as an illustrator and book designer out of Pasadena, California, and her chosen territory, again and again, is quirky characters, friendships and love, built into dense, hand-drawn worlds.
Her two most decorated pieces were never assigned by anyone. A self-initiated cover redesign for “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass” won Category Winner in Book Covers on the New Talent track of the 2023 World Illustration Awards, run jointly by the UK’s Association of Illustrators and America’s Directory of Illustration; an imagined cold-brew tea packaging series took a Highly Commended the same year, in Design Product & Packaging. Both exist purely because she made them to sharpen a self-taught practice into a professional one.
Alice has been redesigned by illustrators for more than a century and a half. Bligh’s version, built on nothing but her own initiative, held its own in a New Talent field meant to spot exactly that kind of independent voice against professionally trained competition.
Why we like it: she treats an imagined tea label with the same care as a classic novel’s cover — proof that quirky characters, friendships and love is a design brief for her, not just a caption.
