One of the main problems when illustrating Alice was how to avoid being too influenced by Sir John Tenniel’s imagery. For the Mad Hatter I tried to get round the Tenniel version by getting rid of his top-hat and replacing it with with lots of different hats, and further suggesting his madness by splitting his face into one half happy and one side sad. Interestingly I later learned, after the book was first published, that a contemporary of Lewis Carroll had written of him that “ ...the two sides of his face looked as if they belonged to two different people.”

Again Sir John Tenniel’s image of the duchess, based on a painting by the Flemish Renaissance painter Quintin Massys “A Grotesque Old Woman,” was difficult to get round, so I thought about a duchess and what she was, and if she had a baby who turned into a pig, what did that make her? I tried to show the porcine aspects of her - the bow in her hair that may remind us of a pig’s ears, the nostrils like a snout, she’s dressed in pink, and, if that’s not enough, there are even sausages round the cook’s apron.

Queen of Hearts is constantly angry so I clothed her in a vibrating mass of red, blue and yellow that’s actually discomforting to to look at for more than a second or two. She’s got more of a three-dimensional reality than the other playing card figures, as befits her more assertive personality. This aspect of two and three dimensions is something I’ve played with in this illustration. From Carroll’s description it’s difficult to grasp what these playing card figures look like - are they flat like real playing cards or are they like people dressed up as playing cards? I’m still not sure.

This is a scene Sir John Tenniel never illustrated, and I can understand why; it was difficult not to make it too grotesque. I’m not sure I totally succeeded.

The Gryphon and Mock Turtle. This scene is from part of the book that seems to have a completely different feel to the rest. The jokes are there in the text, echoed here by the boot-blacked ship and the key-hole shaped opening in the cliff, but there’s an air of melancholy in this passage, no doubt stemming from the mock turtle’s mood - and I’ve tried to suggest this by the overall design and the dark, sombre colours.

For this illustration I made reference to the painting Man with Newspaper by Rene Magritte. He divided the canvas into four rectangles and painted the room four times, showing a man reading the newspaper in only one of the scenes, thereby transforming an extremely boring image into a provocative and profoundly disturbing one. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is the story of a dream and the book was a great favourite of the Surrealists so it seemed entirely appropriate to use the same room in this illustration. But here there are some changes.

The pool of tears. As far as I can remember Carroll forgot to mention any other primates in the book (apart from human beings) but in this passage he does mention that “the pool was getting quite crowded with the birds and animals that had fallen into it: there were a Duck and a Dodo, a Lory and an Eaglet, and several other creatures…”Artistic licence?

Alice’s Hand. This part of the story reminded me of a beautiful etching by Max Klinger from a series of pictures called The Glove, so I paid a little homage by including the strange flying creature in the background. Of course there is no mention of this creature in the book but throughout my version I wanted to echo Carroll’s puns, puzzles and metaphors with dreamlike visual puns of my own.

This is one of the last pictures I painted for the book. I’d avoided illustrating this scene as it’s described so fully in words. When I made a rough preliminary drawing I drew Alice as she was going to be, and I drew the shelves - but I didn’t know what was going to be on them. As I painted the finished artwork, I started at the top and meandered down, like Alice and that green thread, putting in almost anything that came into my head even though it may have been an illogical relevance - but things that had some relevance to the story - a kind of dream logic

After the book was first published I was interviewed on the phone for the Observer, and the journalist talked about how cleverly he thought I’d put hidden clues throughout the book and mentioned the white rabbit in the frontispiece (shown in this picture). I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I went and got the book. “Look at the reflection on the water,” he said. And dammit, he was right! I just wish I’d thought of it myself.Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland illustrated by Anthony Browne is available at the Guardian bookshop