Chris Riddell

didn't look at it at all.

I thought, I don't, in a sense, want the great John Tenniel, who is the definitive illustrator of Alice, sort of looking over my shoulder.

And so I tried to approach Lewis Carroll's text as if Lewis Carroll was Neil Gaiman, and had just sent it to me.

And so I sat down with this book and just illustrated in the way that I felt maybe a

it might look now as a sort of wonderful sort of fantasy adventure.

And I also had 320 pages to play with in full colour, the sort of extraordinary production that just wasn't available when John Tenniel made his exquisite woodcuts.

And I sat down and illustrated

the text over 320 pages.

So I very soon discovered there are all sorts of nooks and crannies in Wonderland that simply Tenniel had neither the time or the budget possibly to illustrate.

So I was able to draw a map of Wonderland and to work out how Alice went from one place to another and where the different episodes might be in geographical sort of relationship to each other.

And I could draw sort of, you know, a croquet game with flamingos and hedgehogs over a number of pages so one could expand, you know, the visual sort of side of things.

And I had most fun, I think, with the most iconic character, apart from the White Rabbit, I think, in the story, which is the Hatter.

And so my interpretation of the Hatter, I knew because having loved Tenniel's Hatter so deeply, I just didn't want to do a poor pastiche of Tenniel's Hatter.

And I knew my Hatter had to be completely different.

So I won't tell you exactly what my interpretation is.

I think you need to find the book and decide for yourself.

But I've gone down a rather different route with my interpretation of that character.

Well, that's a tricky one.

I think, you know, as an illustrator, in a sense, one waits, I suppose, to be asked to do classic texts such as Alice in Wonderland.

I think there is a lovely tradition as students where one produces work for one's folio and then you can take from the bookshelf the much-loved classics and do your interpretation of them.